IMPENDING 
ANARCHY 



W 



S S MEBBERD 



AUTHOR Ol THE "I'HIIOSOI'ilV <)l His I OK 



Impending Anarchy 



S. S. HEBBERD 

Author of "The Philosophy of History ' 



MASPETH PUBLISHING HOUSE 

76 Milton Street, Borough of Queens 

New York 






juBHARYofCONWRESS? 
iwoCouies nece»»^ 

JUN 16 W>8 



Copyright, 1908 

BY 

S. S. HEBBERD 



TO 

HON. WILLIAM J. BRYAN 

The Great Commoner of the West 

This Book is Dedicated 



PREFACE 



It is very difficult, almost impossible, to gain a 
hearing for a philosophic work now unless it is 
written by some distinguished teacher in the univer- 
sities. Works of thought seem to be judged as fac- 
tory products are, by the label of the manufacturer. 
If the label is all right, any kind of nonsense 
— pragmatism, for example — will be received with 
reverence. 

Another difficulty in my case is the American 
zeal for imitation in which we excel all nations 
except, perhaps, the Chinese. This trait is the main 
source of our inferiority in art and literature which 
so many just now are trying to explain. And it 
has made American philosophy farcical. Recall, 
for instance, Professor Royce's sneer — in his 
"Spirit of Modern Philosophy" — at any writer who 
dares to deviate from the past tenor of philosophy. 
Cervantes describes Sancho Panza as "so impressed 
by what his master had told him about enchanters, 
that he would not believe his own eyes." What a 
wonderful forecast of American philosophy, the 
Sancho Panza to a German Don Quixote ! 

A third difficulty may be illustrated by an inci- 
dent. Some months ago copies of my Philosophy 
of History were sent to forty of the most prominent 



PREFACE 

clergymen of New York City. Of these, one read 
it and praised it very highly; two others acknowl- 
edged its receipt, the rest did not have the courtesy 
to do even that. Now I knozv that my demonstra- 
tion of God's existence — given in Chapter II of this 
book — is new and that it carries upon its face con- 
vincing power enough to entitle it to some attention, 
especially in an age like this when the wiser theists 
do not pretend to have any support for their belief 
except the thin vapors and vagaries of "feeling." 
But the thirty-seven would probably say that not 
being experts upon these deep questions, they leave 
them to the college professors. So those rebuked 
by Jesus for building upon the sand might say that 
they were not expert enough in geology to know 
the difference between sand and rock. 

Urged by these and other difficulties I have com- 
pacted my philosophy in this little book. The book 
will be sent to every college in the land ; and surely 
among all these teachers, graduate students, etc., 
there will be someone able and eager to point out the 
fatal flaw, if there is one. 



CONTENTS 

PACE 

Chapter I. The Secret of Thought . 9 

" II. God . . . . .49 

" III. Morality . . . .62 

" IV. Pragmatism and Politics . 77 



CHAPTER I 

THE SECRET OF THOUGHT 

I. Schopenhauer and Hume 

The aim of this little book is to briefly indicate the 
only possible barrier which reason offers against the 
religious, moral and political anarchy now threaten- 
ing all Christendom, and especially the people of 
America. That, of course, outlines a gigantic task. 
So much so that I should never dream of entering 
upon it if there had not more than thirty years ago 
dawned upon me an undiscovered and yet very sim- 
ple principle which seemed to me to instantly illum- 
ine the whole darkened sphere of modern thought. 
And it is an evident necessity that every such dis- 
covery must be of extreme simplicity. Otherwise it 
could never hope to triumph over the might of 
routine and mental inertia. Consider for instance 
the fortunes of the Copernican theory, simple enough 
for a child to understand and yet failing of general 
acceptance even among astronomers for almost a 
century. What would have been its fate if it had 
come couched in the ambiguous mystifying phrases 
of, say, Hegelism? Furthermore, philosophy in its 
9 



IO IMPENDING ANARCH? 

present sad estate as a mere jumble of paradox and 
dispute, is so much neglected by all save a few com- 
mitted to some special system that unless a new 
principle was very simple and clear, it would not 
have the slightest chance of a hearing. 

Let none of those, then, who have wandered long 
in that maze of subtleties and high-sounding 
phrases called Modern Philosophy turn away in 
scorn because my thesis is neither obscure nor intri- 
cate. The secrets of Nature always seem open and 
evident where once we have found them out. But 
it is not so easy to find them out ; it is far easier for 
thought to' wander about amid non-essentials and 
verbiage, to move around in aimless circles like a 
man lost in the woods. 

The principle then, which I here seek to prove 
and establish as the basis of all mental science, is 
simply this : All thinking is a relating of cause and 
effect. In other words, there is no form of thought, 
no percept, concept, judgment or relation that does 
not enfold within it some- causal relation, lacking 
which it would become unintelligible and meaning- 
less. But before proceeding to our proof one or two 
preliminary considerations are necessary. 

Schopenhauer. First, let no one confound this 
principle with Schopenhauer's doctrine that all the 
twelve categories which Kant had found in the 
human understanding were reducible to a single one, 
that of causality. For Schopenhauer, like Kant, 
regarded the understanding as but a part of the in- 
tellect, and a very inferior part, the fatal source of 



THE SECRET OF THOUGHT II 

all illusions. Its categories, therefore, whether twelve 
or one, lacked all true universality ; they applied only 
to mere "phenomena" ; and the upshot was an illu- 
sionism far more thorough than that of Kant, since 
it went boldly on to that pessimism which — as the 
history of India so painfully shows — is the inevit- 
able outcome of every fully developed theory of 
Maya or illusion. 

My doctrine is the exact opposite of all this, both 
in scope and purpose. Its scope is completely uni- 
versal, maintaining that every possible form of 
thinking, as distinguished from mere feeling, in- 
volves a causal relation as its essence. And one of 
my chief purposes is — through the inductive proof 
of the universality of the causal element in all think- 
ing — to establish an ultimate criterion of truth ; and 
thus build a barrier against both the Kantian illu- 
sionism and the "pragmatism" now taking its place. 
In fine, Schopenhauer's view of causality instead of 
being imitated, is shattered by mine. 

The Criterion of Truth. One chief curse of our 
vaunted modernism is that its destructive criticism 
has broken down the old criteria of truth, but has 
not been able to put anything else in their place. 
It has torn down, but knows not how to rebuild. 
Even through all the storm and stress of the eigh- 
teenth century the primary convictions of mankind 
were conserved by the doctrine of "intuitions," or 
"innate ideas," or "universal and necessary truths." 
But finally Kant came forward with a suggestion 
very simple, very true, and yet leading to the most 



12 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

tragic results. He suggested that the doctrine of 
intuitions really discredited what it had been sup- 
posed to guarantee. If man was thus driven irre- 
sistibly to so many beliefs which he could not prove, 
might not these beliefs be mere delusions forced upon 
us all by some twist in our "mental make-up" ? His 
successors, instead of allaying this suspicion, intensi- 
fied it ; and Hegel ended by repudiating even the law 
of contradiction. From that day to this paradox 
and non-sense have seemed to reign supreme in 
philosophy. 

At least the old doctrine of intuitions, etc., has 
been riddled and hopelessly wrecked. And for a 
century our most elementary convictions, our most 
sacred truths, moral as well as religious, have beefi 
hanging in cloud-land, like castles in the air. 

But even if Kant has wrecked the intuitional the- 
ory, there must be some more enduring support for 
the moral and religious life of mankind than vague 
feeling or the evanescent moods of sentimentalism. 
And my doctrine, I think, opens a way to the satisfy- 
ing of this demand, this most vital and urgent need 
of the age. It provides far better than the exploded 
intuitions ever did for an unassailable and ultimate 
critierion of truth. For if I can prove that every act 
of thinking implies a causal relation, then plainly 
to cancel causality is to render all thinking impos- 
sible. The argument is in fact, a reductio ad absnr- 
dum, in the completest form imaginable. The ge- 
ometer proves his theorem by showing that its denial 
would logically lead to the denial of some universally 



THE SECRET OF THOUGHT 1 3 

accepted principle and would, therefore, be absurd. 
We prove our theorem by showing that its denial 
would involve the overthrow of all principles, the 
effacing of all distinctions between the true and 
the false, appearance and reality, existence and non- 
existence — in fine, would involve the utter extinction 
of thought. 

Hume's Problem. In this way I expect to solve 
Hume's celebrated problem which, according to 
Hoffding, "even Kant failed to solve and which 
indeed is insoluble." But that problem is instantly 
solved the moment I prove that the idea of causality 
is logically involved in all acts of perceiving, con- 
ceiving, judgment or inference. Hume claimed that 
causation was nothing but the uniform succession of 
phenomena in space and time. But I shall prove that 
each word in the substituted phrase — uniformity, 
succession, things or phenomena, space, time — has 
involved within it the idea of causality. The rela- 
tions severally indicated by these words all rest pri- 
marily upon causal relations and when the latter 
are cancelled these words lose all their meaning. 
Thus in the very act of denying or doubting causal- 
ity, Hume is really affirming it over and over again. 

II. Cause and Reason 

It will probably be objected to my argu- 
ment that I confound different kinds of caus- 
ality so' diverse that nothing can be predi- 
cated of them in common, But my best 



14 IMFRNDING ANARCHY 

answer to this will he the entire course of my expo-! 
sition wherein these distinctions will not only be! 
carefully kept in mind, but will be more fully and 
clearly explained than ever before. Here 1 confine, 
myself to that distinction which in recent philosophy; 
seems to have almost entirely swallowed up or sub- 
merged the rest — the distinction between cause and; 
reason or ground. 

Bradley devotes an entire chapter of his Logic' 
to emphasizing the immensity of this contrast be- 1 
tween cause and reason. And yet the gist of his 1 
whole argument is given in a single one of three 
illustrations which he uses. "Two coins," he says, 
"are proven to have similar inscriptions because they 
each are like to a third; but the cause is not found 
in this interrelation. The cause is the origin from a 
common die.'' Could anything be sillier than that? 
Here are two different effects : on the one hand, 
two similar inscriptions; on the other, our knozvl- 
edge of their similarity. Certainly the two results 
are not produced by the same cause — to-wit, the 
common die. But how does that prove any anti- 
thesis between a cause and a reason? In fact, it 
proves absolutely nothing but the mere truism thai 
two such utterly dissimilar effects as a physical fact 
and our mental recognition of that fact cannot have 
the same cause. 

The other two illustrations are of like character 
but even more fantastic. Indeed, the entire chapter 
is little more than an incessant repeating of the ar- 
gument just given. 



p 



THE SECRET OF THOUGHT 15 

But a more familiar and also far less absurd argu- 
ment for the alleged antithesis between cause and 
reason is as follows : Cause refers only to 1 changes 
or events, but reason refers to truths which are not 
changes in time but are immutable and eternal. But 
even here, I think, there is the same confounding of 
a fact with our knowledge of the fact. The intricate 
chain of reasons which the geometer gives as proof, 
for example, of the ratio between the diameter 
and circumference of a circle are causes not of the 
fact but of our belief in the fact. And beliefs or 
other mental events are as much changes as any 
physical event. What indeed is more changeful and 
fugacious than the movement of thought ? 

Reason and cause then are in no wise discrepant : 
the former is simply one kind of the latter. 



III. Relations of Resemblance 

Man's mental life starts from the mere noting of 
resemblances. This purely automatic process of de- 
tecting similarities is one which the brutes can per- 
form as well as man and often better; witness, for 
instance, a dog scenting the foot-prints of his prey. 

But that this automatic noting of resemblances 
is not genuine thinking is evident at a glance. For 
the moment we try to express it in clear, exact propo- 
sitions or judgments it shows itself as incurably 
vague, incoherent and even self-contradictory. We 
can affirm of anything that it is like anything else, 



l6 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

and in the same breath we can affirm with equal 
truth that it is not like that other thing. 

How now can this vagueness, and self-contra- 
diction be transformed into real thinking? Simply 
by reaching down to that upon which this incoherent, 
self -contradictory relation of resemblance depends. 
Thus two yellow objects are made alike by the pro- 
cess of color, by the conjoint action of aether- waves, 
nerve-currents, etc. ; at the same time they are made | 
unlike by other causes. In fine, the moment we 
reach the causal relation underlying the likeness or 
difference we begin to think. 

All that seems plain and simple enough. And yet 
I stand ready to maintain that this simple thought 
of a transition from relations of resemblance to 
causal ones enfolds almost the whole sum and sub- 
stance of a true Theory of Knowledge. The recog- 
nition of it would have saved modern philosophy I 
from most of the errors, paradoxes and puerilities 
that have so sorely afflicted it. For example, the 
writer already quoted, Bradley, has sent forth an- 
other famous volume, the key-note of which is as 
follows: "A relational way of thinking — any one 
that moves by the machinery of terms and relations, 
must give appearance and not truth." But scrutinise 
his argument for this amazing proposition and you 
discover that like all Hegelizers, he is occupied solely 
with relations of likeness and difference. And con- 
fined within that sphere, his paradox is but a truism. 
All relations of resemblance are indeed delusive and 
self -contradictory unless we point out that upon 



THE SECRET OF THOUGHT 1 7 

which the resemblance depends — in other words, 
unless they are transformed into causal relations. 

Does some one say that instead of making the 
above sweeping assertion concerning this argument 
against relations I ought to gO' into details and 
prove my point? But 1 have neither space nor pa- 
tience to repeat Bradley's long, wire-drawn dialectic 
and then criticise it line by line ; it may be well, how- 
ever, to fix attention upon his main point and error. 
Note then what appears upon the most cursory in- 
spection that he is crusading solely against relations 
betzveen qualities. He rejects the thing as aught 
beyond a mere group or sum of attributes ; and also 
scouts at causality. Now surely no one will deny 
that qualities thus conceived, without things, dis- 
connected "wandering adjectives," cannot possibly 
have any other relations to each other except likeness 
and difference. Undeniably then he is dealing solely 
with those vague inchoate relations of resemblance 
which, as I have shown, are always incoherent and 
self-contradictory. And thus he finds it easy enough 
to prove to' an astonished world that all relational 
modes of thought "give appearance and not truth." 

But this fallacy of resemblance seems omnipresent 
and almost omnipotent. The empiricists are still 
more in bondage to it than the Hegelians; they 
would reduce all thinking to the blind working of 
the psychical mechanism that associates similarities. 
Ordinary idealism or illusionism also has its main 
source in this fallacy of resemblance. It is taken 
for granted that perceptions are copies or pictures 



1 8 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

of the things perceived, and so the perfectly hopeless 
question arises : "How do we know that these pic- 
tures secreted within, really resemble the world with- 
out? Berkeley's argument constantly hinges upon 
the impossibility of any such resemblance. 1 Scho- 
penhauer boldly claims that we are "conscious of 
these pictures within the brain." 2 And Spencer even 
gives us diagrams showing the degree of correspond- 
ence between the images and the reality. 3 

But these paradoxes all vanish before my simple 
discovery — almost a truism — that a relation of re- 
semblance by itself is necessarily crude, incoherent 
and self-contradictory, that it never becomes really 
intelligible until it is converted into a causal rela- 
tion by showing that upon which the resemblance 
depends. 

IV. Substance and Attribute 

We have here another difficulty from which 
modern idealism or illusionism has germinated. 
Common-sense and scholasticism had found no way 
of comprehending the relation of substance and at- 
tribute except through the crude metaphor of in- 
herence. Attributes inhered in the substance like 
pins stuck in a pin-cushion. 

But real light began to dawn through Herbart's 
famous suggestion that "substantiality is causality." 

1 Principles of Knowledge, S. 8-15, especially. 

2 Schopenhauer, The World as Will, II. 400. 

3 Spencer Psychology, II. 225. 



THE SECRET OE THOUGHT 19 

But that principle needs to be modified by recalling 
the scientific doctrine of the complexity of all physi- 
cal processes of causation. No thing is the entire 
cause of any of its attributes, a host of other agen- 
cies are also* requisite. The thing, for example, is 
but a single factor in the intricate process of causa- 
tion which produces the color of that thing. But 
it is also a factor in each and all the other processes 
whereby the other attributes of that thing are pro- 
duced. Thus we find in the thing a permanence 
which is more or less lacking in its adjectives. Each 
of the latter disappears or changes when any factor 
essential to its production is withdrawn or modified. 
The color fades when the sun goes down; the size 
changes with a change of temperature. But the 
thing endures; this one factor in all the processes 
remains. 

Herbart's discovery then, as we have explained it, 
is incontrovertible : substantiality is causality. That 
would be amply sufficient for our present purpose 
which is to' prove that every relation of substance 
and attribute is a causal relation. In fact our entire 
thesis is demonstrated by this one insight. For all 
thinking as distinct from mere feeling, is reducible 
to affirmation, judgment or predication. And the re- 
lation of subject and predicate which constitutes a 
judgment, everywhere runs precisely parallel to> the 
relation of substance and accident. 

(1) But in addition behold the enigmas, in the 
philosophy of the past which this insight unravels. 
Take first the old dilemma long observed by logi- 



20 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

cians, that if we abstract all the attributes all 
knowledge of the substance vanishes. That plainly 
is but a case of our fundamental law of knowledge 
that causes are knowable only through their effects, 
and conversely effects through their causes. But 
in dealing with this dilemma there was an oversight 
which has passed unnoticed and has led to most dis- 
astrous results. Let me describe this oversight by 
presenting its most famous example. 

(2) The first principle of Hegelism, as everybody 
knows, is that pure or abstract Being=0. The 
oversight here is the one referred to above — the 
confounding of the knowledge of a cause with the 
existence thereof. It is quite true that we can know 
nothing of a thing apart from some of its known 
effects. But it is not true that a thing might not 
exist independently of these effects. And caring 
little for these out-worn' paradoxes, I leave the mat- 
ter thus. 

(3) It is more important, however, to consider 
the now* very common tendency to regard the sub- 
stance as but a name for a special group of attrib- 
utes. The strength of this tendency is laughably 
shown by the case of Hobhouse, who writes an im- 
mense volume in defense of natural realism and 
then throws it all to the winds by proclaiming that 
a thing is naught but the group of its attributes. 
And yet it does not seem hard to get rid of this para- 
dox. We have only to remember that an. effect can- 
not be known nor even exist apart from the cause 
whence it has been abstracted. Modern science has 



THE SECRET OF THOUGHT 21 

taught us that the attributes of things are but so 
many different forms of motion. And it seems quite 
evident that a motion cannot exist apart from some 
moving thing. 

(4) When it occurred to Berkeley that attributes 
instead of inhering in, might be effects of things, 
he answered that things being inert could not be 
causes. But inertia means only that a thing cannot 
act in isolation, but only in conjunction with other 
things. And that is precisely what is emphasized 
in my doctrine : The thing or substance is not the 
entire cause but only a factor in many causal 
processes. 

(5) Another strange freak of bewildered meta- 
physics is Lotze's conception of a thing as an ''indi- 
vidual or realized law." 1 Even Lotze concedes that 
this theory of his contains "something intrinsically 
unthinkable." But substitute for this impossible 
conception that of the thing as the persistent factor 
in each and all of the causal processes whereby its 
attributes are produced. Thus you retain whatever 
truth the idea of a law or formula sought to retain 
and your theory is not what Lotze conceded his to 
be, "the putting together of two< words, on which 
the ordinary course of thinking has stamped two> in- 
compatible and contradictory meanings." 

Other errors invite our consideration, but lack of 
space forbids. But enough has been said, I think, to 

1 Lotze, Metaphysics, I. 93. Also Bowne, Metaphysics, 
39-43- 



IMPENDING ANARCHY 



prove that the relation of substance and attribute 
becomes really intelligible — is freed from the ob- 
scurities and paradoxes heretofore investing it — 
only by conceiving it as a causal relation. 



V. Identity and Change 

Here we encounter another tangle of obscurities, 
and riddles which both the skeptic and the illusion- 
ist have freely used to advance their respective the- 
ories. The difficulties, however, investing this rela- 
tion of identity and change are too well known to 
need recital here : it is only necessary to attempt their 
solution. 

And the key to this solution is to be found, I think, 
in what has already been said concerning the crud- 
ness and self-contradictoriness of all relations of 
resemblance. For the relation of identity and 
change evidently belongs in this catagory : it is but 
a modified form of the relation of likeness and dif- 
ference. The only contrast between them is that in 
the latter the likeness or difference is that between 
different things or objects ; but identity and change 
refer to the likeness and unlikeness of the same 
body to itself at successive periods of time. There- 
fore it follows, as a matter of course, that this rela- 
tion of identity and change, like all others of the 
same class, should be elusive, incoherent and self- 
contradictory. And that it has been so is painfully 
proved by the whole history of thought. Over this 



THE SECRET OF THOUGHT 23 

riddle of identity and change, Greek philosophy at 
an early day split into two parties, the followers 
of Parmenides and those of Herakleitos. And the 
discussion has continued ever since with unabated 
vigor but with slight increase of knowledge or any 
other valuable result. 

Light, however, begins to dawn when we conceive 
this relation of identity and change as a causal rela- 
tion. Anything whatsoever may be considered as 
the embodiment of a particular process of causation 
all its own ; this constitutes its permanent character 
or identity. And the changes through which it 
passes are in large degree the results of this special 
or individual process. Thus a tree embodies a par- 
ticular process of growth from the germ on through 
successive stages until the tree is destroyed. Still 
more is this the case with a human body which may 
cast off every one of its constituent atoms over and 
over again and suffer a host of other changes, but 
still retain its* identity as a single, permanent em- 
bodiment of an invariable process of organic life. 

Nevertheless this concept of identity will necessar- 
ily remain always more or less obscure on account 
of its close kinship with that of resemblance — the 
chief source of all fallacy and confused thought. 
But whatever of clearness and intelligibility is 
possible must always come through stress upon the 
causal relation underlying it. And so we turn to 
another relation far more important, equally chaotic 
and perplexing at present, but more capable of be- 
ing cleared of vagueness and ambiguity. 



24 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

VI. The One and the Many 

There is truth in Professor James' dictum that the 
relation of "the One and the Many forms the most 
central of all philosophic problems, central because 
so pregnant/' 1 But so far its pregnancies seem to 
have given birth to nothing but an amazing brood of 
disputes and futilities. All agree that the human 
mind yearns after some sort of unity. But there 
are so many different and conflicting kinds of this 
unity that the quest after it has ever ended in a 
desert wider and more barren than Sahara. But 
from our present vantage-ground, it seems to me 
that true answers can be found to the three funda- 
mental questions involved in this troublous theme. 
First, what kind of unity does the mind seek ? Sec- 
ond, why does it seek it? Third, and most import- 
ant of all, how can this unity be reconciled with the 
manifest plurality of things? 

( i ) My answer to the first question is, that the 
only self-consistent and really intelligible kind of 
unity is causal unity. Both the two so-called Mon- 
isms which divide the empire of modern speculation 
between them, have their origin and find their chief 
defense in the plea that the mind longs for unity. 
But what a pitiful and preposterous unity it is which 
either of these two systems has to offer ! Consider 
naturalistic monism which seeks to satisfy this 
rational demand for unity by picturing a universe 

'James, Pragmatism, 129. 



THE SECRET OF THOUGHT 25 

consisting solely of an infinite host and whirl of 
invisible atoms? Is not that plurality incarnate, 
a false abstraction, a phantom with the label of 
''Unity" pinned upon its back? On the other hand, 
idealistic monism seeks the same end by blotting out 
the universe as an idle dream, leaving not a wrack 
behind, but an empty "Absolute" which has nothing 
to do* except to "reject inconsistencies." 1 Where, 
on this globe, is there a healthy mind that is really 
longing after any such unity as that? 

Less absurd than these are "the unities of dis- 
course — the universal, the natural kind, etc. — which 
have played so great a part in modern theorizing. 
But, as I shall show a few pages farther on, natural 
systems of classification have been established and 
universals can be made really self-consistent and 
comprehensible only by turning from mere resem- 
blances to find the true import of every universal 
or class in the causal process whereby the members 
of that class have been produced. In fine, it is only 
causal unity which gives intelligibility and satisfies 
the longing of the human mind. 

Even Art, although resting more upon an appeal 
to' the emotions than upon definite formulas of 
thought, furnishes full proof that the real craving 
of the intellect is for causal unity. But for the evi- 
dence of this I must refer the reader to my Phil- 
osophy of History. 2 There it is shown that all 
aesthetic values in their three grand divisions—- 

' Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 139. 

2 Philosophy of History, 66-78; 135-142; 198 and 270 seq. 



26 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

beauty of form, of color and of sound — come not 
from mere imitation but from the dim revelation of 
some latent cause, principle or power upon which 
the infinite variety of nature depends. It is there 
shown, too, that in this respect the history of art 
confirms its theory. The noblest and most produc- 
tive of all aesthetic emotions — the love of nature — 
springs up only among peoples, like those of India 
or of Mediaeval Europe, who were inspired and 
thrilled by the thought of an Infinite Cause pervad- 
ing all things. And in our own times we see the 
love of nature perishing, and. with it all artistic ex- 
cellence, because faith in God as an effective power 
in the world has virtually vanished. To quote the 
magnificent saying of Ruskin : "The modern love 
of nature is a sort of vanity. It is self and its moods, 
not God that we see mirrored in nature." 

A similar proof might be drawn from the history 
of the origin of science. But enough has been said, 
perhaps, to prove what is so nearly self-evident ; to- 
wit, that the only unity which really satisfies the 
mind is causal unity. 

(2) We come now to the second question : Why 
does the human mind crave this causal unity ? And 
the evident answer is, because the very nature of 
thinking" consists in a relating" of cause and effect. 
Reason may be deluded for a while by false anal- 
ogies, metaphors, dialectics of "identity and differ- 
ence," or "the whole and its articulated J>arts," or 
some other crude fallacy of resemblance. But these 
are only inbecilities of thought which inevitably end 



THE SECRET OF THOUGHT 2,*] 

in confusedness and self-contradiction. Therefore 
the mind seeks after causal unity. It can never rest 
or find any lasting delight in the Many until it 
grasps the One, upon which they all depend. That 
is the Monism of the future. 

(3) And so we come to the third question : How 
shall we conceive of perfect unity without effacing 
the evident plurality of things? That is the most 
difficult of all cosmological questions, the rock upon 
which all previous monisms have gone to pieces. To 
save the One, they have had to sacrifice the Many : 
things became mere phantoms; even to association- 
ists like Mill and Bain they evaporated into "possi- 
bilities of sensation." Religion faded into a dead, 
stupid pantheism. As one American philosopher, 
quite orthodox but a most ingenious Monist puts it : 
"In the fullest sense of the word only the infinite 
exists; all else is relatively phenomenal and non- 
existent." A little farther on he ascribes to the finite 
"non-existent existence." Then he adds : "But 
these utterances are so easily misunderstood that 
they should be reserved for esoteric use and frugal- 
ity is to be recommended even there." 3 

But there is no need of thus making shipwreck 
both O'f sense and morals. There must indeed be One 
infinite cause of all. But as we shall see later on, 
that One out of self-sacrificing love has voluntarily 
limited his own activity by imparting something of 
his power to finite beings. Each thing is a factor 
in countless processes of causation planned and 

1 Bowne, Metaphysics, 101-2. 



28 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

maintained by the Infinite. As thus a factor, the 
thing acts ; and whatever acts, exists. Nor is there 
the slightest reason for conceiving this as "a sort 
of non-existent existence.'' 

VII. Relations of Space and Time 

The method which has proved so effective al- 
ready in clearing up the perplexities of the old phil- 
osophy, we have now to apply to spatial and tem- 
poral relations. These indeed are not so utterly 
vague and self-contradictory as those of mere re- 
semblance. Still they have a certain obscurity of 
their own which can be dispelled only by unveiling 
the causal relations implicit within them. Let me 
add that here I shall speak solely of space-relations 
leaving the reader to apply the argument to those of 
time. 

(i) The Reality of Space. Does space actually 
exist or is it but an illusion forced upon us by some 
unhappy twist of the human mind? In answering 
this question I pass over the rather dubious conten- 
tion of realists that we actually perceive so-called 
perceptual space. Instead of that I present what 
seems to me conclusive proof that it is literally im- 
possible to think of space as non-existent. That 
proof can be given in a few words as follows : 

We know our sensations, we discriminate one of 
them from another not through any attributes of 
their own but only through attributes of spatial ob- 
jects perceived. 



THE SECRET OF THOUGHT 2<J 

The sensation produced by a round object is not 
itself circular. The sensation of a mountain is no 
taller than the sensation of an ant-hill. The sensa- 
tion of a red object is not itself painted red. In fine 
perceptive states have no discernible attributes of 
their own, we discriminate between them only 
through the spatial attributes of the objects per- 
ceived. Therefore, when we cancel the spatial at- 
tributes of objects perceived, we annihilate every 
possible means of distinguishing- one perception from 
another. And since the other processes of thought 
— memory, imagination, conception — depend ulti- 
mately upon perceptions, we thus annihilate all 
thinking. The whole fabric of thought instantly 
collapses. 

Do you object that the spatial world is not entirely 
cancelled, but regarded as only existing phenomen- 
ally, as a universal dream, as ideas externalized. 
But your ideas, whether inside or outside of you, 
are still, I suppose, ideas ; and to think of ideas as 
having spatial attributes is the craziest of all self- 
contradictions. But, as we have just seen, they have 
no other attributes by which they can be discrimin- 
ated from each other. And so once again all think- 
ing melts down into one solid mass of unintel- 
ligibility. 

(2) What is Space ? The doubts concerning the 
reality of space have their main support in the dif- 
ficulty of denning what it really is. But this diffi- 
culty is only another signal instance of our principle 
that all relations are incoherent and tend to self- 



30 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

contradiction until we convert them into the causal 
relations which form their real gist. Let us then 
attempt to conceive of space as an indispensable 
factor in all processes of physical causation. Do 
you say that space is inactive, does nothing, neither 
produces nor resists motion, and therefore cannot be 
a factor in causal processes? I answer that every- 
thing else seems to be under the same impotence. 
Things, too, are inert; we have to interpolate into 
them some mystery of force to explain there activ- 
ity. Things have their peculiar office, and so has 
space in those immeasurably wide and complex 
processes by which even the minutest results — say a 
speck of color on an insect's wing — are produced. 
Space indeed seems a more supreme factor than 
things: for if it is withdrawn motion becomes im- 
possible and thus every physical process falls in- 
stantly to pieces. 

The trouble with even our most recent philosophy 
is that it is still pre-scientific. It has never really 
taken into account that primary lesson of science — 
the complexity of effects. The art of the illusionists 
consists in cutting a causal process to pieces, and 
then showing that none of the factors by itself can 
do anything. For example, space is first shown to 
be inert, it is not a thing and therefore is nothing 
or non-existent. And so space being destroyed it 
is easy to show that things and motions are impos- 
sible. Thus heaven and earth vanish as at the stroke 
of a conjuror's wand. 

Continuity of Space. Let me give in the most 



THE SECRET OF THOUGHT 31 

compact form possible the proof that space is ab- 
solutely continuous. When we speak of the separa- 
tion of objects we mean that there is space between 
them. But to think of space as separated into parts 
is impossible; for in order that the parts should be 
separate there would have to be space between them 
and consequently no separation of the parts. In 
other words the division of space into parts is a 
contradiction in terms. But Kant entirely ignored 
this unmistakable fact in his famous antinomies con- 
cerning the infinite divisibility of space: he did 
not see that space was not divisible at all, either 
finitely or infinitely. Spinoza saw it a hundred years 
before ; and if Kant had seen it, we should have been 
saved from the paradoxes and skepticism engendered 
by his antinomies. 

VIII. Perception 

But this blur and darkening of thought due to 
overlooking the causal relation implicit in every sort 
of relation reached its climax in the modern contro- 
versy concerning perception. 

At first modern illusionism insisted and rested 
upon this fallacy of resemblance in its crudest form. 
Berkeley's constant refrain is that an idea can be 
like nothing but an idea; a color or figure can be 
like nothing but another color or figure. That and 
"the inherence" theory are the Alpha and Omega 
of his argument. It never occurs to him to doubt 



3- tAf TENDING. ANARCHY 

that our perceptions must be copies or images of the 
objects perceived. And to this day among both 
idealists and agnostics, this pictorial conception of 
knowledge has been the main staple of the argument 
for illusionism. Even that most superlatively tran- 
scendental of all American idealists, Royce, is not 
ashamed to argue that "the qualities of things need 
not, nay can not resemble the ideas that are pro- 
duced in us. * * * Sound waves in the air are 
not like our musical sensations. * * * Nor are 
the aether waves that the sun sends us like our 
ideas when we see the sun." 

Kant's Error. But Kant gave to the argument 
for illusionism an altogether new aspect. He lays 
little stress upon, in fact rarely mentions, the sup- 
posed proof resting upon the assumption that knowl- 
edge must be a copy or picture of the objects known. 
Instead of that he relies upon a subtle criticism of 
spatial and temporal relations ; their enigmas and 
self-contradictions, he thinks, prove that space and 
time are only figments of the mind, mere "forms of 
perception." And with space and time gone, of 
course the whole extended universe goes too. 

Now the really fatal error infecting the whole 
of the Kantian criticism has never been recognized, 
I think, either by its foes or its friends. That error 
consists in an altogether false view of the nature of 
knowledge. He does not see that the gist, the centre 
and circumference of all genuine thinking and know- 
ing consists in relating causes to their effects and con- 
versely effects to their causes. Nay, more than that, 



THE SECRET OF THOUGHT 3$ 

he regards this only true knowledge as only ignor- 
ance, as "appearance" or illusion. He repeats over 
and over again — frequently two or three times on 
v. single page — that "we know nothing of what 
things may be in themselves, knowing only their 
appearances, i.e., the representations which they 
cause in us by affecting our senses." * And he re- 
jects this only true knowledge as mere illusion be- 
cause somewhere in the back-ground of his thought 
there lurks a misty ideal of a nobler sort of knowl- 
edge which — alas! — the human mind can never at- 
tain. "We know not this thing in its internal con- 
stitution," he is continually sighing, "but only know 
its appearance." 

Now this dim ideal of an unattainable knowledge, 
I am persuaded, is only a survival, the ghost of the 
crude view of sensation as a copy or picture. As 
such, it landed Kant in a tangle of self-contradic- 
tion and paradox. Why, for instance, should one 
who has renounced space as a false appearance puz- 
zle himself over "the inner constitution of things" ? 
Furthermore, Kant's successors and followers, while 
they generally reject his "Thing in itself," yet show 
themselves as much mystified and astray as he 
was. For they do not really argue against this 
"thing in itself," but merely load it with abuse. 
Thus Bradley within the compass of a single page 
vilifies it as "a wretched abstraction," as "utterly 
worthless and devoid of interest" — "an irrelevant 
ghost" — a false and empty abstraction — a sheer 

1 Kant, Prolegomena, 75. 



34 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

self-contradiction — a "false idea" — and "an idol." * 
Better than so many epithets would have been the 
detection of the fatal error in Kant's philosophy and 
in his own- -a false theory of knowledge. True 
knowledge consists in the relating of effects to their 
actual causes. To know anything is to know not 
what it is like, but what it does. Only when we 
know what it does do we know what it really is. 

In the chapter upon Pragmatism I shall endeavor 
to more completely justify my theory of knowledge 
by showing how the truth in the conflicting systems 
now in vogue, is thus harmonized. And so I leave 
the matter for the present. And in regard to the 
general subject of perception, having in the previous 
section demonstrated the reality of space, and in 
this pointed out the fatal error vitiating the Kantian 
criticism, there seems no grave necessity for dwell- 
ing longer upon this rather thread-bare theme. In 
fact I have been long convinced, as many others 
are now beginning to be, 2 that the dispute concerning 
perception between the two rival schools is virtually 
a verbal one. But in so speaking I do not mean to 
disparage the high aim which idealism has claimed 
to pursue. That aim was to guarantee those pri- 
mary convictions upon which the morality and re- 
ligion of mankind repose. But such a guarantee 
cannot be gained in that way. This is abundantly 
proved by the history of the Maya doctrine in In- 
dia and of Kantian illusionism in the nineteenth cen- 

1 Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 131. 

2 Woodbridge. In Studies in Philosophy, 147. 



:he secret of thought 35 

tury. Indeed, morality and religion would perish 
utterly if mankind believed that they could be de- 
fended only by accepting the paradoxes of idealism. 
But I hope to show in these pages that there is a 
better way. 

IX. The Concept 

Hegel's chief contribution to human thought was 
his doctrine of the concrete universal. Nor is it any 
discredit to< him as a discoverer that his view was 
incomplete, neither very thorough nor profound. 
He saw that there was an element of truth in the 
orthodox realism of the Middle Ages which modern 
enlightenment had not regarded; that the true uni- 
versal is more than an abstract something exempli- 
fied by the individual. Much less was it an imag- 
inary collection of resembling individuals. In one 
passage at least he says that tne true universal is 
not merely some common element in all of the kind, 
it is their Ground, their Substance. 1 It is something 
pervading and determining all the characteristics of 
each one and binding together its qualities. There 
Hegel is drawing very close to my theory of the 
concept as being, in its most radical meaning, the 
symbol of a causal process. But as usual he is car- 
ried away on the wings of his metaphor about the 
organism. And so he misses the heart, the essence 
of every concept as indicating that invariable pro- 
cess of causation, that mystic interplay of many 
factors creating the individuals of that particular 

1 Hegel. Encyl. Werke, VI. 339. 



36 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

kind — whether a stone, a speck of dust, a human 
society, or a planetary system. That is no meta- 
phor ; it does not oblige us to think of the universe 
as a plant or an animal : it is plain, solid scientific 
fact. 

But it shows the retrograde character of 
modern philosophy that Hegel's rudimentary 
view of the universal instead of being de- 
veloped as it might have been, has faded 
more and more into a mere paradox until 
now a crude Nominalism reigns almost without a 
rival. Even Lotze, 1 subtle and thorough thinker as 
he undoubtedly was, abandoned concepts to their 
fate. He decides that the universal cannot claim to be 
called an idea "in any ordinary sense of that term. 
Words like color and tone are in truth only short 
expressions of logical problems whose solution can- 
not be compressed into the form of an idea. * * * 
We cannot grasp the common element which our 
sensation testifies them to contain but which cannot 
by any effort of thought be really detached from 
their differences and made the material of a new 
and equally perceptible idea." 

It is certainly a singular creed. In things of 
the same class, a common element revealed to sense 
but hidden from thought, of which indeed the mind 
cannot form so much as an idea. And yet this myth 
of a common element is a commonplace in modern 
philosophy. One American author 2 even asserts 

1 Lotze. Logic, p. 24. 

2 Porter. Intellectual Science, 331. 



THE SECRET OF THOUGHT 37 

that ' the grand distinction between man and the 
brute is that the latter "has no power at all to 
think the similar as the same" — wherein I think 
the brute shows more sense than the man. For to 
speak of a common element in different things is 
the acme of absurdity : it is point-blank self-contra- 
diction open and unashamed. And it never takes 
us one step beyond the old fallacy of resemblance — 
things are alike and not alike. 

But put now in the place of this relation of mere 
resemblance, a causal relation. For example, red 
and green are not classed together as colors because 
there is a common element of color inside of each of 
them, but because both are resultants from one 
causal process — a process mathematically invariable 
and as universal as the known universe itself. 
Plato saw this invariability of concepts and sug- 
gested that they were causes. The mediaeval school- 
men adopted Plato's view ; but neither he nor they, 
in those pre-scientific times, could comprehend the 
complexity of a causal process. Modern science, 
however, has made that idea clear as noon-day. Yet 
modern philosophy forgetting its Plato, scorning 
the Middle Ages, disregarding even the lessons of 
science, is still mumbling its senilities about the 
common element in things. Indiscernibles, it tells 
us, are identical ; the similar is the same. 
But I shall not rest here with abstract, metaphysical 
discussion. For this question concerning the es- 
sence of the concept is of supreme importance. If 
the essence of all concepts can be proved to be this 



3§ IMPENDING ANARCHY 

indicating of a causal process, it would be enough 
by itself — even without reference to what has been 
said in previous pages — to demonstrate my thesis 
that all thinking is a relating of cause and effect ; for 
no act of thinking is possible save through the 
medium of concepts. Not confining myself, there- 
fore, to psychological introspection, I shall make a 
wider appeal to the historic experience of mankind. 
I shall try to show that from the very first the human 
mind has dimly realized that a concept was the 
symbol of a causal relation. And that to this con- 
sciousness, the origin of both language and science 
is due. 



The origin of concepts. It is now a Avell-estab- 
lished principle in philology that the majority of 
verbal roots express acts, and mostly acts which men 
in a primitive state of society are called upon to 
perform — such as digging, plaiting, weaving, strik- 
ing, throwing, binding, etc. 1 Furthermore they are 
generally acts performed in common; for only thus 
could they become intelligible to the entire commun- 
ity, and only thus could the merely accidental ele- 
ments be eliminated. And most important of all, 
we are told that the mere consciousness of the acts 
of digging, binding, etc., is not enough; only when 
the processes are such that their results remain per- 
ceptible — for example, in the hole dug, in the tree 

1 Mnller. Lectures 011 the Science of Thought, 30. 



THE SECRET OF THOUGHT 39 

struck down, in the reeds tied together as a mat — 
do men reach conceptual thoughts in language. 1 

Could there be any clearer proof than this that 
concepts spring from the recognition of processes of 
causation ? Or as Professor Noire has expressed it : 
"The conception of causality subsisting betzveen 
things. Verily this constitutes such a simple, plain 
and at the same time obvious and convincing means 
of distinguishing the logos, human reason from ani- 
mal intelligence that it seems inconceivable that this 
manifest and clear boundary line should not long 
ago have been noted and established as such." 2 

The classifying process. We turn now from this 
unimpeachable proof presented by the origins of 
language to evidence of another kind, later, but 
equally conclusive. It is the testimony offered by 
man's prolonged effort to rightly classify natural 
things. But first of all we must get rid of the an- 
cient superstition that true classifying consists 
merely in noting the similarities or resemblances of 
objects. Logicians and philosophers still cling to 
that idea with a sad tenacity ; and yet a slight inspec- 
tion of scientific methods ought to have taught them 
better. But we have proved that a mere relation 
of resemblance in and by itself is vague, misleading 
and even self-contradictory. This principle we wish 
now to apply to the history of classification. 

We find that at a quite early period men, even 
the half-civilized and the savage, had succeeded in 

Mbid. 31. 

2 Noire, Origin of Language, 47. 



40 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

classifying living things, so far as they were known, 
into their species or lowest kinds. The reason of 
this success is evident. They had constantly before 
their eyes the processes of production upon which 
the resemblances depended, and hence it was not 
difficult to distinguish between specific and non-spe- 
cific characteristics. 

But concerning inorganic things there was no such 
knowledge; their processes of production were hid- 
den in a darkness which the most enlightened could 
not penetrate. Hence we find that every effort to 
classify these inorganic things ended in complete 
and even comical failure. So great a genius as that 
of Aristotle could invent no better scheme for ar- 
ranging inanimate things than under four such 
kinds as "the hot and dry, the hot and wet, the cold 
and dry and the cold and wet." 

Note, furthermore, that ancient classification even 
of organic things was confined solely tx> species. For 
thousands of years learned men — Theophrastus, for 
instance, whom Aristotle selected to be his succes- 
sor — had been studying botany; and yet until three 
centuries ago they had not advanced beyond the 
childish division of the plant-world into "trees, 
shrubs and herbs." But light dawned at last when 
Gessner discovered that true genera could be formed 
"by noting characteristics drawn from the process 
of fructification" Since then naturalists in their 
long search for a true or natural system of classi- 
fication — as Darwin expressly affirms * — "have al- 

1 Darwin, Origin of Species, Chap. XIV. 



THE SECRET OF THOUGHT 41 

ways been unconsciously guided not by mere resem- 
blances, but by the principle of inheritance." But 
principle of inheritance is but another phrase for 
process of production. What better proof than this 
unconscious testimony could be offered for my "doc- 
trine that relations of resemblance are valuless until 
converted into causal relations ? - 

And under the guidance of this same principle, 
Darwin himself was led to that sublime discovery 
which has revolutionized modern thought. 

Why then should logic remain eternally myopic, 
seeing only the rough, blurred resemblances, blind 
to that upon which they depend ? Hegel, as we have 
seen, had a faint glimpse of the truth, but it faded 
away into a metaphor. But logic need not shrink 
into poetry ; it needs only to remember that a concept 
must be understood as pointing not to a bunch of 
mere similarities, but to the process of production 
upon which the similarities depend. Thus we sur- 
mount the seeming contradiction between the Dar- 
winian view of the concept as in a continuous state 
of transition and the Platonic view of it as abiding 
and changeless. The characteristics even in their 
variation are the necessary results of a process of 
production that never changes. Just as the infinitely 
varying motion of a falling stone is the resultant of 
the invariable process of gravitation. 

Abstraction. Another line of evidence is opened 
by considering that ignoble prejudice against "the 
abstract" which Hegel and his pupils have done so 
much to foster. The master was indeed an adept in 



4- IMPENDING ANARCHY 

ambiguities, but the pupils speak out boldly. Thus 
Bradley, for example, sends forth a book of five 
hundred pages crammed with destructive criticism 
hinging mainly upon the singular claim that to con- 
ceive is to "mutilate.*' We are there taught that "all 
analytic judgments are false." Why? Because in 
judging we must abstract, and in abstracting "we 
have separated, divided, abridged, dissected, we have 
mutilated the given." 

But surely all that is mere foolishness. In ab- 
stracting, say the red color of an apple, you do- not 
divide or dissect anything; you simply fix your at- 
tention, focalize your thought upon a particular 
aspect presented by the apple. You do not destroy, 
as Bradley asserts you do, "that vital interconnec- 
tion of things which is their life." On the contrary, 
you enlarge and illumine that interconnection. You 
still consider — if you are sane — the color as insepa- 
rably connected with the apple, but also as connected 
with other factors, in the vast process of causation 
that has produced the color — with the sun, the aether 
waves, the wondrous mechanism of nerve and brain. 
All these amplifying, illumining functions of the ab- 
stracting act, functions opening up such endless 
vistas to man and lifting him into communion with 
the Infinite, all these Bradley overlooks in his un- 
founded fear that thought may be "mutilated." 

The Meaning of the Copula. Here we have an- 
other theme that has long been enveloped in hopeless 
controversy and paradox by the failure of logicians 
to reach the deepest meaning of the concept. Even 



THE SECRET OF THOUGHT 43 

the sober-minded Sigwart ends his rather prolix 
inquiry into the matter with the half-despairing 
question: "But how does it happen that the verb 
to be, which is the expression of actual existence, 
assumes a formal function in the copula whereby 
it loses its meaning — nay, even seems to contra- 
dict it?" 1 

My answer to that question is that in the copula 
"to be" neither loses nor contradicts, but rather 
reveals its true and deepest meaning. For it is now 
quite generally agreed that being is known to us 
only as behavior, what it does or suffers. In other 
words, to exist is to be in causal relation with other 
existents. And that is precisely its meaning in the 
copula; it asserts a causal relation between the sub- 
ject and the predicate. 

What adds to> the cogency of this interpretation of 
the copula is that there is no other. If you reject 
this you must either accept Hegel's view that the 
subject is identical with the predicate, which is ab- 
surd on its face. Or you must cling to the common 
view which does not even pretend to explain the 
copula. 

Such then is my summary of the proof — many 
different lines of evidence, starting from many dif- 
ferent sources and all converging upon the common 
conclusion — that a concept essentially means, not a 
bundle of resemblances, but a process of causation. 

1 Sigwart, Logic, I, too. 



44 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

Reasoning 

Let me first refer to the empirical theory of reas- 
oning as it is presented by an eminent American 
thinker, Professor James. He begins by claiming 
that "the most elementary single difference between 
the human mind and that of brutes lies in the defi- 
ciency on the brute's part to associate ideas by sim- 
ilarity." But that is hardly an obvious truth. 
Rather it would seem as if the brute excelled the 
man in this power of detecting the most minute 
and subtle similarities. What man could rival the 
blood-hound in tracking the foot-prints of his prey ? 
And even among men, the savag-e in this respect sur- 
passes the civilized; it would seem as if this auto- 
matic power of noting resemblances decayed as man 
grew more reflective and rational. And yet, James 
regards this association by similarity as the crown- 
ing trait of human genius at its loftiest. He even 
describes Newton's immortal discovery as due to 
"a flash of similarity" between an apple and the 
moon. 1 

But let us preserve our gravity, and consider what 
really happened, if the apple incident is true. It 
flashed upon Newton, not that apples and moons 
were similar, but that two events the most absolutely 
dissimilar that could be imagined — the fall of an 
apple and a celestial motion — might yet prove to be 
the products of one invariable process of causation. 

1 Principles of Psychology, II. 360 



THE SECRET OF THOUGHT 45 

Dissatisfied with Kepler's theory that the planetary 
motions were caused by angels pushing the planets 
around, lie devoted years of incredible toil not to 
detecting a similarity between apples and the moon 
but to demonstrating this causal process. And, as 
I have shown in my Philosophy of History, 1 all the 
great triumphs of inductive reasoning which have 
created modern science were achieved in like man- 
ner. Sometimes it was a new process discovered 
or demonstrated ; sometimes the unveiling of a hid- 
den factor in a process otherwise familiar. Next to 
Newton's discovery, the most notable instance of 
the first kind was the creation of optics by Snell's 
discovery of the mathematical character of refrac- 
tion which for centuries had been sought for in 
vain, baffling even the genius of a Kepler. 2 Acous- 
tics also had a precisely similar origin. 3 The most 
signal instance of the second kind was the creation 
of chemistry as a true science by attending to what 
had previously been a neglected factor in chemical 
processes. And yet this factor was the most potent, 
the most widely diffused of all chemical agents, the 
atmosphere. It is pitiful to read how many other- 
wise skillful experiments made even as far back as 
the Middle Ages, came to naught and how many 
brilliant discoveries were nipped in the bud by this 
neglect to take account of the atmosphere or its 
chief constituent, oxygen. But at last comes 

1 Phil. History, 60, 189, 254, seq. 

2 Ibid, 262. 

3 Ibid, 261. 



4^> IMPENDING ANARCHY 

Lavoisier who discards "phlogiston" and its "nega- 
tive weight" — in place thereof puts oxygen. And 
as by magic the previous confusion and absurdity 
disappear. Everything becomes orderly and sane. 
After so long wailing, chemistry has become a 
science. 1 

But it is impossible here to go through the list 
of the sciences. Enough has been said, I trust, to 
show that the essence and aim of scientific reasoning 
is to discover causal processes previously hidden 
either in whole or part. 

The Emptiness of Idealism. But it may be ob- 
jected that the idealists have anticipated me. Lotze, 
for example, proclaims that thought "always con- 
sists in adding to the reproduction or severance of 
a connection in ideas, the accessory notion of a 
ground for their coherence or non-coherence.'' And 
he adds that "this peculiarity of thought will gov- 
ern the whole of our subsequent exposition" of 
Logic. 2 But it is all a mirage. For, Lotze — thor- 
ough Kantian as he is, does not really believe in 
causation but only in sequence. He is tied as much 
as the crude empiricist to the fallacy of resemblance ; 
to him causality is only a name for the identity of 
the successive members in a series of mysteriously 
interconnected results. In the long run he finds no 
basis for reasoning and truth except in "intuition" 
and faith. 3 

1 Ibid. 194 and 265. 

2 Lotze, Logic, 5. 

3 Jones, Philosophy of Lotze, 267, seq. 



THE SECRET OF THOUGHT 47 

There is an equal emptiness in the phrases used by 
the Neo-Hegelians to describe reasoning. For to 
them all "cause and effect is irrational appearance 
and cannot be reality." ] Their phrases about "sys- 
tematic inference/' or "the articulated whole and its 
casts are only a new disguise for Hegel's old meta- 
phor of the organism. And this vague, shadowy 
metaphor sheds no light either upon the act of reas- 
oning or the causal processes of nature. Not even 
in biology is this idle metaphor of any use. Let us 
remember that in some simple, unicellar structure, 
an amoeba, we may now behold an actual, percep- 
tible example of that physiological process by the 
multiplication of whch all the infinite variety of liv- 
ing things is produced. And one of the most emin- 
ent of biologists tells us that the real development 
of his science has hinged upon this visible disclosure 
of the physiological process. Only as inquiry, he 
says, has turned from the highest organisms to study 
in the lowest the process of life in the concrete has 
biology in theory and practise made much progress. 

And SO' in all the sciences, inductive reasoning 
has for its essence and aim, the disclosure of causal 
processes either perceptible or verifiable. To that 
fact the whole history of the scientific movement 
testifies. To that I add nothing but an attempt at 
demonstrating that this causality is real; so real 
that it cannot be frittered away into mere sequence 
or into some vague metaphor likening the universe 
to a plant or animal. 

1 Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 58. 



4$ IMPENDING ANARCHY 

And in that attempt at demonstration, I now 
claim, with supreme conlidenee, to have completely 
succeeded. The various relations which thought 
recognizes, have been found to be unintelligible and 
meaningless until we unfold the causal relations 
implicit within them. All thinking in its three 
grand divisions, perception, conception and reason- 
ing, has been proved to be essentially a relating of 
cause and effect. Therefore, the cancelling of caus- 
ality logically involves the entire collapse and ex- 
tinction of thought. Thus Hume's problem is finally 
solved. The great barrier which for nearly two 
centuries has barred any real progress in philosophy, 
has been removed. 

So much then has been accomplished by thus un- 
veiling for the first time in the history of speculation 
— the true secret of thought. And now we turn to 
still more momentous problems that must be solved, 
if human society is to be saved from impending 
anarchy and ruin. 



CHAPTER II 

GOD 

I 

I. The Ontological Proof of God's Existence 

Among all metaphysical themes, the ontological 
proof for God's existence is the most important, the 
most often discussed and the most thoroughly mis- 
understood. Kant rightly asserted that all other 
proofs were based upon this ontological one. Yet 
he claims to have refuted and demolished this basal 
proof by simply showing that a hundred imaginary 
dollars were not the same as a hundred real dollars 
in a man's pocket. How shallow that refutation is, 
how utterly it misses the real force of the argument, 
can from our present point of view be very clearly 
shown in a few words. 

For Kant conceives the ontological argument as 
assuming that the idea of any object whatsoever 
proves the existence of that object. But such a way 
of conceiving the argument is not only erroneous, 
it is supreme silliness. The very essence of the 
argument is that the idea of God stands alone and 
apart from all other ideas, is absolutely unique; of 
49 



50 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

it alone is it true that the idea of the object proves 
the existence of the object. Why? 

To fully understand this reason why, we must 
substitute for the word "being" in the ordinary 
rendering of the argument, the word "cause." Then 
the infallibility of the proof shines forth as the light 
of the sun. For I have now demonstrated that to 
deny the reality of causation involves the extinction 
of thought. But if causation is real, there must be 
an infinitely real and perfect cause. Why infinite, 
you ask ? Because whatever is finite or limited must 
be an effect and therefore not a complete cause. 

But why — you persist — may not these finite things 
which seem to have a sort of mixed nature, partly 
cause and partly effect, be after all the only causes ? 
Because by such a supposition you annihilate all 
real causation and thus put an end to all thinking. 
For, these finite things, with their mixed nature, 
form by themselves nothing but an indefinite series, 
a mere sequence. In other words you are back again 
in the meshes of Hume's paradox which substitutes 
sequence for causality. But we are now rid of that 
paradox : for I have shown that the concept of se- 
quence — like all other concepts — becomes entirely 
unintelligible and meaningless when the idea of 
causality is cancelled. * 

This then is the ontological argument in brief. 
To deny the existence of God — that is of an infinitely 
real and perfect cause — is to deny all causation, and 
that is the suicide of thought. 



GOD 51 

II. The Cosmological and Teleological Proofs. 

The ontological proof is complete in itself, so in- 
controvertible that it needs no support or confirma- 
tion from other sources. Its convincing power must 
have been felt more or less consciously by all rational 
minds long" before it gained articulate expression 
even in such imperfect forms as those given it in 
the Middle Ages. The chief office of the other 
proofs — cosmological and teleological — is to clarify 
this conviction and remove obscurities gathering 
around it. 

(1) The essence and aim of the cosmological 
proof is to show that the creative activity of God — 
of the infinitely real and perfect Cause of all — must 
be conceived as a self-sacrificing activity. For in 
the first place, only through this conception can the 
existence of God be harmonized with that of inde- 
pendent finite beings. In so far as the latter possess 
any degree of independence whatsoever God has vol- 
untarily limited his own activity for the sake of 
others. And in the second place, only through this 
conception can any adequate motive for creation be 
made to appear. For the Infinite has need of noth- 
ing; and if, per impossible, it did have needs, then 
in supplying them its activity would be caused by 
something* lacking and alien to itself, and to that 
extent the Infinite Cause would become an effect 
requiring another cause ; and w r e should be again on 
the downward path of the infinite regress. In fine, 



$2 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

activity on the part of the Infinite inevitably implies 
self-sacrificing effort for the sake of others. 

I claim no originality for the insight just given. 
Indeed one of the strangest things in the strange 
career of modern philosophy is that it should have 
l>een so utterly blind to this conception of activity 
for the sake of others being inseparably involved in 
the very idea of an Infinite Cause. For that concep- 
tion is really one of the oldest possessions of human 
thought. More than two thousand years ago it 
was proclaimed in India by the Sankhya philosophy 
in the following words : "Every intelligent being 
acts either from self-interest or beneficence * * * 
a creator who has all that he can desire has no in- 
terest in creating anything. The demiurge would 
be unjust and cruel." * Here my principle is taken 
for granted, but creation is denied on the pessimistic 
ground that it could not be an act of "beneficence/ ' 
And Sankhara, the famous foe and critic of the 
Sankhya system, concurs with it upon this point ; so 
in both of the rival Hindu schools this principle was 
a common-place. All that I can claim is to have 
restored what has always lain dim and mutilated in 
human consciousness — to have established it as an 
indubitable deduction from the demonstration of 
causality given in the preceding chapter. 

(2) Upon the argument from design I need say 
but little, since those who entirely reject the other 
proofs are generally inclined to look with some favor 
upon this. Kant declares that "this argument de- 

1 Gough, Philosophy of the Upanishads, 206-8. 



GOD 53 

serves always to be mentioned with respect. It is 
the oldest and clearest of all proofs and best adapted 
to convince the reason of the mass of mankind. It 
animates our study' of nature, etc." But then he 
goes on to show that by itself this argument is in- 
sufficient to prove God's existence, that it must fall 
back upon the cosmological and ontological proofs, 
and these are worthless. 

At present those who still claim to believe in God's 
existence seem driven to this strange impasse. 
While the ontological argument, as Kant rightly 
maintained, is the basis upon which the other two 
must rest, it is the one most misunderstood and 
quite generally rejected; but the other two — especi- 
ally the proof from design — are received with favor. 
Thus the proof of God's existence seems to be in 
the very perilous position of a pyramid resting upon 
its apex. But by my insight just given, all that is 
exactly reversed. The pyramid of proof stands 
solid upon its base, wide as thought, simple and 
strong as truth must ever be. And upon it rest the 
two other forms of proof, far loftier, firmer, more 
convincing than ever before. 



III. God's Personality 

McTaggart, the bravest and most candid of Eng- 
lish Hegelians, boasts that "they who deny it (God's 
personality) were never so numerous as at present. 
And those who do hold it, hold it, it can scarcely be 



54 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

doubted, with far less confidence." 1 That is, un- 
doubtedly, all too true. For example, Lotze, the 
most renowned of all recent thinkers who have 
posed as champions of theism, finally bases his belief 
in God's personality solely upon the ground that 
"we feel the impossibility of its non-existence * * * 
many other attempts may be made to exhibit the 
internal necessity of this conviction as logically 
demonstrable ; but all of them must fail." 2 Now if 
Lotze is right, if our belief in a personal God has 
no logical evidence but rests solely on the evanes- 
cent moods of feeling, then this belief is certainly 
doomed to disappear, and that right speedily. ' For 
even in the palmiest clays of "primitive credulity," 
and in the darkest of "the Dark Ages" men would 
have disdained to consciously rest their most sacred 
beliefs upon any such flimsy basis as feeling. They 
never doubted that there was solid evidence for their 
convictions — nature, revelation, the authority of 
the wise, etc. They knew too well the folly and 
fickleness of feeling to trust to that. Will then this 
present age, so proud of its skepticism, so well 
trained by modern science to insist always upon the 
strict verifying of its beliefs, be very apt to long 
bow down before convictions unprovable, attested by 
naught but blind formless feeling? Especially, if 
the conviction is one like that of a personal God 
which the vast majority of men would gladly cast 
off if they could. 

1 McTaggart, He gels' Cosmology, 91. 

2 Lotze, Microcosmus, IT. 670. 



god 55 

Listen, for instance, to such words as these from 
an eminent writer upon natural history themes, John 
Burroughs : "When I look up at the starry heavens 
at night and reflect upon what it is that I really see 
there, I am constrained to say, 'There is no God.' 
* * * It is not the works of some God that I 
see there. I see no lineaments of personality, etc." 1 
Or, again, from the same source 2 : "We must get rid 
of the great moral governor or head director. He is 
a fiction of our own brains. We must recognize 
only nature the All ; call it God if we will but divest 
it of all anthropological conceptions. * * * But 
this paternal Providence above nature — events are 
constantly breaking it down." 

Such is the plain drift of modern culture. And 
with the whirl and gusts of mere emotion do you 
expect to turn back this tremendous tide? Such a 
supposition is absurdity incarnate. 

We are standing now before the near approach 
of the most irretrievable calamity that ever threat- 
ened the human race. It would seem that human 
life — never too> happy — must henceforth be carried 
on without any belief in God or freedom, the moral 
order of the world or real basis for the distinction 
between right and wrong. Of the old treasures of 
the race nothing apparently remains but some vague 
sentimentalism and a few empty phrases. But in 
the face of this mental and moral anarchy now so 
plainly impending. I have ventured to offer my 

1 Burroughs, The Light of Day, 164. 

2 Ibid, 169. 



56 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

demonstration that God still lives. I have solved 
Hume's problem and thus proved the reality of 
causation. From that I have deduced, directly and 
simply, the fact that there must be an infinitely real 
and perfect Cause whose activity is that of self- 
sacrificing love. Nothing else is needed to demon- 
strate the personality of God. And this demonstra- 
tion is not disturbed in the slightest degree by such 
objections as those offered by Burroughs and a host 
of like-minded thinkers, that the universe is very 
big or that its eternal order is not altered at the 
beck of human whims. 

If that demonstration is valid, it is of incalculable 
value. It is worth more to America than a thousand 
battleships. For it would save us from that impend- 
ing anarchy, mental and moral, in comparison with 
which all the other perils of the Republic are but a 
bagatelle. 

Ought not our teachers of philosophy, then, lay 
aside their little systems and Chinese puzzles long 
enough to determine whether this demonstration 
shall stand or fall? 

IV. Sacrificial Theology 

But there is one real difficulty connected with my 
demonstration that doubtless has already occurred 
to the reader. I have shown that the idea of God 
regarded as an infinite, self-sacrificing Cause acting 
for the sake of others is readily deducible from the 
idea of causality conceived in its completeness and 



GOD 57 

perfection. The passage from the latter to the 
former is so plain and open, that even uninstructed 
minds incapable of formally making the deduction, 
yet feel its force instinctively. To him who com- 
prehends, however faintly, the full meaning of caus- 
ality, God manifests Himself in every thing and 
event. Not a leaf stirs, not the simplest of all the 
complex processes of nature is beheld but what the 
mind is normally carried up to the thought of a 
God of wisdom and love. 

But if this is true why has this pure conception 
of the Deity so rarely prevailed in the history of 
the race? Why has it been degraded into so many 
grotesque, even demonic forms? Why did Bud- 
dhism, the religion of one-third of the human race, 
start upon its great mission by absolutely renouncing 
the idea of God? The answer is that while this 
impulse Godward is so universal there are in human 
nature many evil, irrational impulses, many diseases 
of the soul that contend against it mightily. 

One type of these opposing forces very clearly 
unfolds itself from, bad to worse throughout the 
whole history of Hindu religion. The farther we 
go back in the history of India the purer and more 
rational its religion appears. In the earlier Vedic 
hymns there are no evil gods ; there is even a tend- 
ency to think of all the deities as but so many 
names for one God. But the most characteristic 
feature of this early Vedic faith was what has been 
aptly called its apotheosis of sacrifice. Sacrifice was 
die first principle of morals; nay, more, it was 



5& IMPENDING ANARCHY 

conceived as the primary condition upon which the 
cosmic order depended. If there were no sacred 
offerings, the succession of days and nights, the 
course of the seasons, the steadfastness of the firma- 
ment would cease. 1 In fine, "the sacrificial act was 
the instrument of creation." 2 "In the beginning of 
time the Supreme Being created all things by the 
sacrifice of himself; he, Prajapati, having divided 
himself into three parts." 3 In a famous Vedic 
hymn it is said : "So the gods through sacrifice 
earned a right to sacrifice." 4 We may pronounce 
all this preposterous, call it with Oldenberg, "empty 
mummery, a disease of Vedic poetry." 5 Neverthe- 
less the hard fact remains that thus dimly and in 
fantastic forms the Vedas preserved the primitive 
view of creation as an act of self-sacrifice on the 
part of the Infinite. That it was a survival from 
an earlier tradition is proved by many facts. For 
instance a similar account of creation is given in 
the Scandinavian Edda. 6 And the Zendavesta rep- 
resents Ahura Mazda as offering sacrifices to the 
lower divinities whom he had created. 

But mere feeling, being vague and undefined, 
tends always to one or the other of two extremes — 
exaggeration or exhaustion. In Indian civilization, 
as I have shown in my Philosophy of History, the 

1 Mann, III. 76. 

2 Williams, Bralimanism avd Hinduism, 44. 
* Brhadderafa, Harv. Or. Scries, II. 369. 

4 Rig Veda, X. 90, 16. 

5 Buddha, p. 11. 

Ragozia, Vedic India, 382 ; and Menzies, Hist. Re ligions, 68. 



GOD 59 

sense of causality ever tends to the first named 
extreme — to ever growing excess. The thought of 
the Infinite Cause swallowed up all else: finite re- 
sults seemed insignificant; the world was naught 
but Maya or illusion. Under the influence of this 
illusionism, life took on a gloomy, pessimistic tinge : 
self-sacrificing love degenerated into the self-torture 
of the ascetic. And so, as I have already stated, 
both the skeptical Sankhya and the orthodox philos- 
ophy denied the creation of the world on the ground 
that the Infinite could not have created it for his 
own sake since he had need of nothing; nor for the 
sake of others since for them its creation would 
have been an act not of beneficence, but of injustice 
and cruelty. Thus Brahminism became an imper- 
sonal pantheism; and Buddhism recognized no God 
but the iron chain of Karma. 

(2) In the West, on the contrary, the sense of 
causality tended to the other extreme — that of ex- 
haustion and decay. There only practical, tangible re- 
sults counted. And there, consequently, we see the 
idea of sacrifice dwindling into the idea of a com- 
mercial transaction. This degeneration is visible even 
among Semitic peoples ; at first sacrifice was an act 
of "sacramental communion," a feast of fellowship 
and love between the god and his worshippers who 
were considered as closely akin ; but in later times 
sacrifice lost this high significance, faded into the 
sordid idea of a mercantile affair, an inter-change of 
gifts. Above all, among the utilitarian Romans sac- 
rifice meant absolutely nothing but a shrewd bargain- 
ing with the gods ; they even thought it possible occa- 



60 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

sionally to over-reach a benignant deity and the 
human debtor always availed himself of such an op- 
portunity to out-wit his celestial creditor. On the 
other hand, the god would cheat the man if he had 
the chance and so the worshipper had to be very 
careful to avoid any mistakes in form which would 
enable the god to evade his part of the contract. From 
self-sacrifice to sordidness — that is the whole history 
of Paganism in the West. 

(3) In the Middle Ages we see the restoration of 
what had been lost in classic antiquity — man's con- 
fidence in a universal Cause acting for the sake of 
others. But this restored confidence no longer rested 
solely upon vague feeling, instinctive, unconscious 
reason, but upon the authority of what was regarded 
as a divine revelation. Thus it was preserved from 
the worst exaggerations of Hindu feeling such as 
pantheism, Maya and metempsychosis. Still, insep- 
arable from a faith so rigidly outlined and fixed in 
form there were many perils and far-reaching evils, 
some account of which has been given in my larger 
work and need not be repeated here. 1 Suffice it to 
quote the words of a clear-sighted historian : "The 
presence of the Infinite, whether to> an individual or 
a race, is bought at a great cost. * * * Through 
this selva oscura lay the path from ancient to 
modern civilization, and few will be disposed to as- 
sert with Rousseau and Gibbon that the cost was 
greater than the gain. 2 

1 Ph.il. History, 171-Q. 

3 Bury, Later Roman Empire, t, ia 



GOD 6r 

The lesson of the Middle Ages is that neither feel- 
ing nor faith can fully guarantee that upon which 
human progress depends — confidence in the infinite, 
self-sacrificing Cause of all. 

(4) For very soon mediaeval assurance began to 
succumb to modern criticism. The climax was 
reached in the general acceptance of the Kantian phil- 
osophy which — "unable to solve Hume's problem" 
— surrendered causality as nothing but a name for an 
indefinite series of events between which the mind 
"feigned" some mysterious connection. Thus an al- 
together new ill was added to the burden of humanity 
already heavy enough. Even Hindu philosophy, 
revelling in illusions, had never dreamed of listing- 
causation among them. But now although many 
theorists still prate about causation, yet what they 
mean is something quite different — sequence, "iden- 
tity" of effects, or perchance, Mr. Bosanquet's "artic- 
ulated whole and its parts." And this decay of belief 
in causality, as I have shown, must inevitably carry, 
with it a decay of the belief in God. Nay, more, 
the entire dissolution of the latter must be speedier 
than the dissolution of the former, since it has more 
enemies to contend against. For no one, I presume, 
has really any very bitter feeling towards the theo- 
retic principle of causation. But quite apart from the 
Christian revelation, the ordinary experiences of life 
do certainly seem to> teach that there is native in the 
human breast no slight degree of "enmity against 
God." 



CHAPTER III 

MORALS 

I. Human Freedom 

Kant was plainly right in declaring that 
morality without freedom is impossible : whatever 
one ought to do he can do. Nor does it make the 
slightest difference whether he is prevented from act- 
ing morally by the compulsion of outward physical 
force or by that of his inward character or habits of 
life. The attempt to make such a distinction seems 
to me one of the many pitiful subterfuges in our 
modern philosophy which are far more disgraceful 
to it than even its evident failure to solve the prob- 
lems set before it. 

And so we come straightway to the very heart of 
ethical science — the proof that man is the free and 
therefore responsible cause of his own actions. And 
I wish to say at the start that I enter upon this task 
with full consciousness of its difficulties and its 
perils. The average teacher of the philosophy now 
in vogue will look upon such an attempt very much 
as he would upon an attempt to prove that the sun 
"do move." I expose myself to the sneer of a Brad- 
62 



MORALS 63 

ley saying : "Free Will is a mere lingering chimera. 
Certainly no writer who respects himself can be 
called on any longer to treat it seriously." 1 

Nevertheless, I take the risk of treating the ques- 
tion "seriously," and challenge all determinists to 
show any fatal flaw in my argument. 

The Burden of Proof. There is at least a prima 
facie proof of man's freedom and responsibility in 
the simple, incontrovertible fact that he is a conscious 
being, knowing the nature of his act and the trend 
of its results. No matter how much he may be in- 
fluenced by his environment, by heredity, acquired 
habits or character, he is at least a conscious factor, 
an accomplice in the evil act. Nothing can acquit 
him of moral responsibility except positive, full proof 
that he was compelled to so act, could not act other- 
wise. Therefore, the burden of proof lies upon the 
determinist. He must be able to strictly prove that 
the evil act was the result of real compulsion either 
from without or from within. But just there is the 
secret of this wretched controversy about freedom. 
The determinist, as I expect to show, has not a shred 
of any such strict proof ; his theory rests on a sheer 
assumption. But he throws the burden of proof 
upon his opponent. The latter must show that he 
is not thus compelled; and so far he has had little 
evidence to offer except that most of mankind so 
believe. So this gravest of all human issues lapses 
into a wrangle, a flood of rhetoric and a whirlwind 
of words. 

1 Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 435 Note. 



f>4 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

Some uneasy consciousness of this, I imagine, 
lies at the root of such impudent assertions as the 
one just quoted from Bradley. The burden of proof 
is indisputable. Determinism is an effort to shuf- 
fle the responsibility for an evil act upon another; 
and we are all agreed that such an attempt adds a 
new element of unspeakable baseness to wrong- 
doing unless we can clearly prove our non-responsi- 
bility. Indeed, it is this which turns misconduct 
into sin. For, according to determinism, the re- 
sponsible party is not the evil-doer but the God who 
made him. 

The Law of Causation. But the determinist will 
claim that he has positive, invincible proof of his 
doctrine to offer. He will appeal to the so-called 
Law of Causation that every change must have a 
cause. That, he will maintain, is a universal and 
necessary principle which proves the truth of de- 
terminism. Now, the only full and satisfactory 
answer to this is the one I am about to give : and it 
never has been given before in any book or treatise. 
It is as follows. The determinist confounds two 
very different truths : the one, The universal law 
of causation; the other, an inductive discovery con- 
cerning motions made barely three centuries ago. 
Let us consider them both. 

First, the law of causation is indeed of universal 
application. For it rests upon the evident fact that 
every change is an abstraction and, therefore, it 
must be an effect dependent at least upon that from 
which it has been abstracted. A change cannot exist 



MORALS 65 

by itself independently of something that changes. 
But the law goes no farther than that. 

The second truth is the inductive discovery made 
three centuries ago that a thing never changes its 
motions unless it is acted upon and forced to change 
them by some other thing. But it is sheer assump- 
tion and utterly unscientific to arbitrarily extend 
this induction from the realni of things and their 
motions to the realm of mind and its volitions with- 
out giving any valid ground for such extension. 
Therefore determinism is driven to fall back upon 
the law of causation; and that is fully satisfied by 
considering the mind or self as the cause of its own 
volitions. 

Thus determinism mixes up in dire confusion 
two truths ; the one of universal application but per- 
fectly consistent with human freedom; the other, 
one for the extension of which over the psychical 
sphere no proof can be given. And with this I 
leave the matter. 

Responsibility. The older «determinists strove 
hard to retain the idea of responsibility, while de- 
nying freedom. It was really but the device, so 
familiar in modern speculation, of retaining a word 
while giving to it a meaning quite contrary to that 
it had always had in ordinary usage. But moral 
science has now become so thoroughly demoralized 
that the determinists of to-day seem to regard such 
timid devices as no longer needful. Thus Professor 
James, in his recent apology for Pragmatism an- 
nounces that "a man, woman or child ought to be 



66 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

ashamed to plead any such pitiful principle as im- 
mutability" — by which he means moral responsibil- 
ity. 1 When our chief universities teach the youth 
of America such lessons as these, it would look as 
if the age of anarchy was not very far distant. 

Determinism then is altogether indefensible. The 
burden of proof is upon it. Yet it has no particle 
of proof to offer — nothing but the mere assertion 
that what is true of motions must be true of thought 
and will. And with this I turn aside from the 
question of freedom for the present. 



II. The Sacrificial Theory of Morals 

"Goodness is an appearance : it is phenomenal 
and therefore self-contradictory." 2 So proclaims a 
writer whom I quote often on account of his un- 
rivalled genius in the dubious art of discovering 
self-contradictions. And he goes on to show us 
wherein this sad self-discrepancy lies — to wit, in 
the conflict between the principle of self-assertion 
and that of self-sacrifice. The ends sought by these 
two antagonistic principles, he says "Are each alike 
unattainable" in the finite sphere although in the 
Absolute they may be transcended. And finally, 
"Most emphatically no self-assertion nor any self- 
sacrifice, nor any goodness or morality has as such 
any reality in the Absolute. Goodness is a subor- 

1 James, Pragmatism, 118. 

2 Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 422. 



MORALS 67 

dinate and therefore a self-contradictory aspect of 
the universe." 

Few have carried the demoralization of morals 
to such stupendous heights of paradox as that. Still 
some such discrepancy of principles has been recog- 
nized by all moralists : it has been the main pivot 
upon which ethical controversies have turned. 
Now here let us try that method which we have 
found so successful in solving other problems of 
speculation. Instead of trying to hide the obvious 
differences between these two principles, turning and 
twisting them so that they may seem alike or even 
identical, let us advance from relations of resem- 
blance to causal ones. Let us see what will happen 
if we consider these contrasted principles of self- 
sacrifice and self-assertion as standing to each other 
in the relation of cause and effect. 

Self-sacrifice. By self-sacrificing acts I under- 
stand those that are done, primarily, for the sake of 
others. They need not be exclusively deeds of char- 
ity ; they may be social duties performed or laws 
obeyed with a conscious design of promoting the 
general welfare even at the cost of some loss, pain 
or inconvenience to ourselves. But the self-denial, 
the merging of one's own interest in the regard for 
others must be the paramount consideration, the 
mainspring of action, the cause. And self-asser- 
tion, the promoting of one's own interest must be 
subordinated thereto as but a result to be hoped for, 
but ever apt to be counteracted by untoward circum- 
stances. Wherever the self-sacrificing spirit is 



68 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

supreme or causal and self-interest is subordinated 
thereto as but its possible result, there and there 
alone is virtue. 

"In every-day life," says the writer just quoted, 
"a man can seek the general welfare in his own, 
and can find his own end accomplished in the gen- 
eral. * .* * But for popular ethics not only 
goodness itself, but each of its one-sided factors 
are fixed as absolute. Goodness is apparently now 
to be the co-incidence of two ultimate goods, but 
it is hard to see how such an end can be ultimate or 
reasonable. *-.*■'* In short, the bare conjunc- 
tion of independent reals is an idea which contra- 
dicts itself." In those few words there is a perfect 
nest of errors. ( i ) Common-sense ethics does not 
consider the self-seeking impulse as "absolute" ; the 
virtue of prudence becomes the vice of selfishness 
when it has no higher origin than the brute instinct 
of self-preservation. (2) Self-sacrificing love is not 
an "aspect" of self-assertion any more than the sun 
is an aspect of the little germ which it lifts from its 
earth tomb into light, growth and beauty. ( 3 ) The 
self-regarding impulse is not an "independent real," 
but always dependent and relative — always a blun- 
der and a sin where it does not spring from a kindly 
and loving spirit. (4) The conjunction of the two 
principles ceases to be "an idea that contradicts 
itself" when we conjoin them, not in the vague self- 
contradictory relation of "identity and difference," 
but simply as cause and effect. 

Through this sacrificial theory of ethics we are 



MORALS 69 

delivered from the errors of other ethical systems 
besides the Hegelian. We are saved, for instance, 
from the ascetic tendency which ruled the morality 
of India and the Middle Ages; for, causes can be 
known only through their results; and therefore 
there can be no true self-sacrifice in a self-torture 
hurtful to the actor and beneficial to no< one else. 
And similarly we are saved from the formalism of 
Kantian ethics which outlawed happiness and re- 
duced duty to the grim restraint of an abstract, uni- 
versal law. Thirdly, it delivers us from that chief 
of all ethical abominations, the Pharisaic ideal of 
self-perfection or "self-realization" ; man should in- 
deed seek to perfect himself, but when that is not 
subordinated to the higher impulse, when it is made 
the all-engrossing aim, the source and mainspring 
of action, it can iead to nothing but "the whited 
sepulchre full of dead men's bones." 



III. The Moral Order of the World. 

But it avails little to have proved man's freedom 
and to have found the essential principle of morals 
unless we can answer this third question : What are 
the sanctions of morality ? Why should a man sac- 
rifice his own desires and advantage, suffer loss and 
pain for the sake of others? Note now how in- 
credibly inept the ordinary answers are. 

Utilitarianism. Before giving the Utilitarian's 
answer let me say a good word for the system itself 



/O IMPENDING ANARCHY 

as standing- far at least one indubitable truth. That 
truth is that moral laws, like physical ones, must be 
verified by their results. By countless experiments 
conducted at an incalculable cost of pain and blood 
we have discovered certain rules of conduct that 
seem in the main conducive to human welfare. 
And even if the code had been divinely revealed, 
experiment would have been needed for its proper 
interpretation. For example, the Middle Ages and 
modern times, though bowing before the same 
sacred code differ much in moral sentiment and 
life, because each has given a special prominence to 
some particular part of the code. And universally 
the worst iniquities of mankind have sprung not 
from the willful transgression of some known pre- 
cept of morality but from the unconscious obscura- 
tion of it by the over-shadowing importance 
ascribed to some other precept. The only safe- 
guard against such obliquities is the appeal to ex- 
perience, the constant testing of conduct by its in- 
fluence upon the felicity of the race. 

Utilitarianism stands for that truth and deserves 
credit therefore. But when our present question is 
put to it, its answers are too silly to be even laughed 
at. Witness, for example. Mill's answer; each man 
naturally seeks his own happiness, therefore all men 
will seek the happiness of all. In other words, one 
man can jump across a brook, therefore all men can 
jump across the Atlantic. 

Social Influences. Others imagine society to be 
the sole source of ethical sanctions. One Western 



MORALS 71 

professor at least can see nothing in virtue but the 
love of praise and the fear of punishment. 1 But 
that is certainly — to say nothing of graver offenses 
— to mistake the effect for the cause. Society is the 
creation of the self-sacrificing spirit, not its creator. 
Society indeed does not seem to be very efficient even 
as a mere servant of righteousness. Her public laws 
are directed only ag-ainst a few vices that happen 
to hurt her most. And as for the love of praise, 
that indeed is a mighty motive in human life, but 
it seems far less potent in fostering virtue than in 
engendering hypocrisy, avarice, pride and a whole 
brood of treacheries. 

But instead of further negative criticism, let me 
quote that notable confession of the most candid 
and thoughtful of all Utilitarians — Siclgwick 2 — at 
the close of his chief work. "Hence the whole sys- 
tem of our beliefs in the intrinsic reasonableness of 
conduct must fall, without an hypothesis, unveri- 
fiable by experience, reconciling the Individual with 
the Universal Reason, without a belief in some 
form or other that the moral order which we see 
imperfectly realized in the actual world is yet actu- 
ally perfect. * * * Reject this belief and the 
Cosmos of Duty is reduced to a Chaos, and the pro- 
longed effort of the human intellect to' frame a per- 
fect ideal of rational conduct is seen to have been 
foredoomed to failure. 

But that belief in the moral order of the world 

1 Studies in Philosophy, V. The Moral Judgment, 100-135. 

2 Methods of Ethics, 473. 



*]2 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

I have now established by demonstrating the exist- 
ence of an Infinite Cause whose activity is for the 
sake of others. To deny that existence is to can- 
cel all causality and that means the utter extinction 
of thought. It is idle to attempt to establish this 
belief in the way ordinarily adopted, by an abstract 
generalization from the chequered, conflicting ex- 
periences of life. That is manifest when we re- 
member how our estimate of life changes with our 
ever changing moods : in one mood all is brightness, 
in the next all is dark and evil. 

The Immorality of Nature. But do not the in- 
justice and inequalities so evident in life, prove that 
Nature is unmoral, indifferent to right or wrong? 
The answer now almost universally made is in the 
affirmative. But Jesus, whose insight into morals 
has revolutionized the world, did not think so. On 
the contrary he takes this indifference, this unswerv- 
ing uniformity of Nature as his chosen symbol and 
proof of God's love. "He maketh his sun to rise on 
the evil and the good and sendeth rain on the just 
and the unjust." 

And we can now readily comprehend the splendor 
of that view so contradictory of common opinion. 
Nature veils reward and punishment in order that 
true freedom and virtue may be developed. God is 
no slave-driver standing behind us, with a lash 
ready for ever}- evil act and a bribe for every good 
one. If his judgments were "speedily executed'' 
we should be as moral as pigs are when they run to 
the trough at the call of the swine-herd. But 



MORALS 73 

through darkness, suffering and unrequited toil man 
climbs to all that is sublime and really divine in 
existence. 

Thus our thesis is wonderfully corroborated in 
quite an unexpected way. The belief in the moral 
order of the world, as we have said, is not primarily 
an induction from the chaos and conflict of human 
experience, but a direct deduction from the idea of 
causality. But when this demonstrated belief is 
fixed firmly in the mind, it begins to gather new 
confirmation and a deeper meaning even from the 
very facts of experience that had seemed to contra- 
dict it. And those acquainted with the history of 
science, know that this is always one chief test of a 
genuine scientific discovery. 

The Independence of Ethics. But it may be ob- 
jected that my view destroys the independence of 
ethics, makes it dependent upon theology. And 
why should it not be thus? Are not all branches of 
physical science dependent upon mechanics or the 
laws of motion? 

Note however, that morality is not thus made 
dependent upon any particular form of religion, nor 
even upon any supernatural revelation nor dogmatic 
outgrowth therefrom. Morality rests only upon 
that supreme principle which underlies every truly 
religious mood, that most evident and certain truth 
within the scope of human knowledge — the truth 
that the denial of an Infinite, self-sacrificing Cause 
logically involves the complete collapse and extinc- 
tion of thought. 



74 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

The Future of Morality. And if morality is still 
to endure it must somehow rind a way of basing 
itself upon demonstrated truth. In more credulous 
times faith sufficed to keep truth alive. But the 
chief characteristic of modern science, the most pre- 
cious gem in its crown, is its firm insistence upon 
the strict, full verifying of its beliefs. Thereby the 
physical conceptions of the Middle Ages, inaccurate 
and unproved, resting mainly on faith and au- 
thority, have been replaced by a vast body of exact 
and verified beliefs to which we give the proud 
name of science. But this very insistence upon 
exactitude and proof which has wrought such won- 
ders by the creation of physical science has had a 
deadening effect upon the moral and spiritual vigor 
of the modern age. In the field of ethics and re- 
ligion there has been the same increasing demand 
for definiteness and demonstration, but the demand 
has gone unsatisfied. For the reality of moral ob- 
ligation the only proof offered has been declamatorv 
appeals to "intuitions," "ethical postulates" or other 
empty phrases. 

Thus the very basis of morality has been gradu- 
ally undermined. A secret, almost unconscious but 
deadly doubt, has been gradually diffused even 
among the common people. For they, too, in these 
days, read and reflect. They, too. distrust declama- 
tion, assumptions, poetic metaphors, and are de- 
manding proof. Flence, ethical skepticism, once 
confined to the erudite and the luxurious, is spread- 
ing among the poor and the oppressed. Who else 



MORALS 75 

indeed have so many seemingly good grounds as 
they for doubting the moral order of the world ? 

In an age so trained in doubt and insistent upon 
proof as this, morality must inevitably vanish, 
if to the many attacks now being openly made upon 
it, no answers can be made but vaporing and senti- 
mental phrases. But against all such attacks my 
doctrine offers an impregnable defense. For ex- 
ample, is it claimed that moral freedom militates 
against the infinitude of God ? * The answer is 
ready that his voluntary limitation of his own ac- 
tivity for the sake of others does not impair his 
infinitude but rather reveals it at the summit of its 
glory. Or do you say, with Professor James, 2 
that the science of psychology has no way of meas- 
uring the force of resistance to temptation and hence 
cannot prove that it is capable, in all normal cases, 
of withstanding the evil impulse. I reply by re- 
ferring to that scientific principle of the complexity 
of causal processes which has already solved for us 
so many riddles. Man in his struggle against evil 
is never alone; quite apart from the Christian revel- 
ation, or from any mystical consciousness of aid in 
the hour of struggle, it follows as a plain corollary 
from our demonstrated theorem concerning the in- 
finite Cause that the tempted always have God on 
their side and so always can, if they will, draw 
strength from inexhaustible sources. In fine, all 

1 Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution, II. 129. 

2 Psychology, II. 



y6 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

ethical skepticism dissolves before this conception of 
the infinite self-sacrificing Cause. 

The demonstration of the physical order of the 
world is universally regarded as the noblest work 
wrought by these four modern centuries. Who 
then who really loves virtue can refuse to give 
some attention to my demonstration of the moral 
order of the world? 

Addendum 

I have somehow omitted in the text the following 
quotation from Indian epic poetry given in Viveka- 
nanda's Karma Yoga, p. 62. And perhaps it is bet- 
ter that it should stand thus alone in order to em- 
phasize how very old and wide-spread my doctrine 
is. I can claim only to have given to this primitive 
instinct the force of demonstrated fact. 

Krishna says : "Look at me, Arjuna ! If I stop 
from work for one moment the whole universe will 
die. Yet I have nothing to gain from the universe. 
I am one Lord. I have nothing to gain from the 
universe, but why do I work? Because I love the 
world." 

Contrast that with Jonathan Edwards' view of 
God's infinite love of himself. (Riley, American 
Philosophy, I. 180-4. 



CHAPTER IV 

PRAGMATISM AND POLITICS 

I. What is Truth? 

Among the many proofs of my fundamental prin- 
ciple here offered, one of the most convincing is that 
craze called Pragmatism which seems just now to 
be raging like an epidemic. For that principle is 
that inasmuch as all thinking can be proved to be 
essentially a relating of cause and effect, therefore 
the cancelling of causality involves the collapse and 
extinction of all thought. Now pragmatism is the 
climax of that obscuration of the distinction be- 
tween the true and the false which has been spread- 
ing and deepening ever since Hume launched his 
"insoluble problem" upon a troubled world. For 
the pragmatist affirmation is, that the true is noth- 
ing but the useful. And to prove that affirmation 
true you would need to show that it is useful to 
believe that affirmation to be useful. And to prove 
that, you would need tx> rummage for a third utility, 
and then for a fourth, and so on in infinite regress. 
Surely such a whirligig of nonsense is near enough, 
77 



78 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

for all practical purposes, to the complete collapse 
and extinction of thought. 

Just now we are being deluged with this endless 
talk about 'Values." Royce tells us about their ' 'ap- 
preciation" ; Hoffding about their "conservation," 
and the brightest genius of them all, poor 
Nietzsche, about their "trans valuation." But what 
is the true standard of all these values ? Is it merely 
the kk cash value" of which James speaks so often in 
his recent defense of pragmatism? Surely, here is 
one question of the true or false which is logically 
prior to all discussion of values. 

But it is idle to argue against what is merely a 
symptom of a growing disease. It is far more im- 
portant to understand the pathological conditions 
of which the symptom is but a passing effect. For 
there is really nothing novel in pragmatism. Its 
phraseology is different from that used by Kant; 
but behind these differences as another has said : 
"There is an essential identity of thought, an 
identity which a comparison of the details of the 
two doctrines makes apparent." x What could be 
a more pragmatic denial of all distinction between 
the true and the false than Kant's central dogma of 
phenomenality — that strange a-priori compulsion 
to believe the categories true and at the same time 
to believe them to be false? Or than Hegel's iden- 
tifying of contradictories? Or Bradley's "degrees 
of reality"? What are all these and other dogmas 
of like import but so many signs of a mighty under- 

1 Ra.ub,Pragmatism and [Kantianism. In Studies, Phil., 212. 



PRAGMATISM AND POLITICS 79 

tow that for more than a century now has been 
sweeping us out upon a fatal sea where all is dark- 
ness, where reason is wrecked and truth sinks out 
of sight? 

But pragmatism, being bolder, more out-spoken, 
less cumbered with ambiguous technicalities than 
the older systems, reveals more clearly the real 
source of this evil tendency in modern thought. For 
manifestly its strength lies not in any force in its 
own argument — heaven save the mark ! — but in the 
weakness of its opponents. For the latter when 
taunted as they constantly are by the pragmatists 
with Pilate's old question : "What is truth" ? have 
absolutely nothing to offer. The old view of a 
true thought as being a correct image or copy or 
picture of reality is hopelessly obsolete. And noth- 
ing better appears in its place, except possibly the 
Neo-Hegelian doctrine of coherence, or the artic- 
ulated whole and its parts. But that, as I shall show 
later on, is almost equally futile and misleading. 
And SO' in default of any sound answer, the prag- 
matist triumphantly preaches that truth is nothing- 
hut utility. One almost despairs of human progress 
when he contrasts this modern answer with the one 
that Jesus gave nineteen centuries ago: "To this 
end was I born and for this cause came I into the 
world, that I might bear witness to> the truth." 

Nor from our present point of view does it seem 
difficult to definitely determine what truth is. 
Abandon the crude fallacy of resemblance; a true 
idea is certainly not "like" the object ideated. Sub- 



80 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

stitute for that relation a causal one. All will prob- 
ably concede that objects of some sort are presented 
to us, and that these presentations are more or less 
infected with falseness or illusion; furthermore all 
history teaches that man's whole inquiry after truth 
has consisted in a long search for the causes pro- 
ducing this false, illusory element. Where the 
causes are known the illusions no longer trouble us ; 
as we see, for example, in the case of the rising and 
setting of the sun. Putting these facts together I 
conclude that the essence of truth consists in the 
affirming of such causal connection as actually exists 
between objects. 

( i ) A Universal Concession. Do you say that 
I ought to go on and give in detail the evidence for 
my theory of truth? But fortunately there is no 
need of this prolixity. For both the rival schools 
of thought, the empiricist and the idealist alike have 
always maintained what forms the essence of my 
theory, although without understanding the full 
force of their concession. Despite their endless 
disputes and preposterous paradoxes, both schools 
have agreed in regarding some kind of necessary or 
unvariable connection between objects as the one 
fundamental and absolutely indubitable element in 
all human knowledge. Both, indeed, have been so 
dominated by Hume that they have given this con- 
nection some other name than causation; the em- 
piricist calls it mechanism, the idealist calls it co- 
herence, "articulation" or something of that sort. 
But that concerns us not at all, since we have proved 



PRAGMATISM AND POLITICS 8t 

that all these other relations have each a causal 
relation involved within them. The vital point is 
that both schools make this connection the one es- 
sential and indispensable element in knowledge. 
The idealists especially have ever insisted with 
eager, even tiresome emphasis, that their doctrine 
made no difference in regard to the connection of 
phenomena. Hence I will waste no time in proving 
what nobody denies. 

(2) Truth as Coherence. But concerning the 
Neo-Hegelian theory of truth as coherence a word 
must be said upon which I entreat the reader to 
ponder. Divested of the metaphorical, mystifying 
terms in which it is couched, this theory of "the 
articulated Whole and its parts" is not very far re- 
moved from my view of truth as causal connection ; 
but it is vitiated by two great over-sights which 
have led straightway to the utter failure of all Heg- 
elian attempts to interpret rationally either morals, 
modern science or human history. 

Even the Hegelians themselves begin to realize 
the fact of this failure and to some extent its 
cause. They see the folly of pretending to any such 
knowledge of the systematic Whole as that from 
which the knowledge of the parts is supposed to be 
derivative. Or as their most recent exponent, 
Joachim, puts it : "Nothing short of the one all-in- 
clusive significant whole — ideal or absolute experi- 
ence — can be completely coherent in this sense of 
the term." 1 And on the next page he comes to 

Joachim, The Nature of Truth, 170. 



82 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

this conclusion : "The coherence-notion of truth 
may thus be said to suffer shipwreck at the very 
entrance of the harbor * :;: * the voyage ends 
in disaster and a disaster which is inevitable. For 
unless our whole discussion is fundamentally mis- 
taken the coherence notion of necessity involves the 
recognition that certain demands both must be and 
cannot be completely satisfied." 

(i) The first of these over-sights has already 
been pointed out by Stout 1 ; the coherence theory 
fails to account for what is most essential in imme- 
diate or perceptual knowledge. "The test of truth 
which is really operative in the development of 
knowledge includes an appeal to immediacy as well 
as to coherence." 

But without dwelling upon what is almost a tru- 
ism, note now that my theory of truth avoids that 
rock. For, the recognition of causal connection is 
just as much the essence of immediate as of any 
other kind of knowledge. On the one hand in every 
perception we behold a wonderfully complex process 
of causation of which the object perceived is the 
chief, the most constant, the determining factor; on 
the other hand the perception or mental state as the 
result or product of that process. And inasmuch 
as all thinking is a relating of cause and effect, 
therefore we cannot know the causal process save 
through its product and conversely the product only 
through the process. 

The illusionists imagine that they gain new sup- 

1 Mind, Jan., 1908. 



PRAGMATISM AND POLITICS 83 

port for their theory in the recent scientific discov- 
eries concerning the character of the elements. But 
it is not so. Whether the elements may be atoms or 
electrons or something still more subtle, the new 
knowledge we are gaining of them is simply a 
deeper insight into what they are doing — their swift 
transmutations, their wonderful dealings with "a 
store of energy so great that every breath we draw 
has within it sufficient power to drive the work- 
shop of the world." 1 That is an ineffable gain to 
knowledge. But merely to picture the elements, 
not as atoms but as "the manifestation of units of 
negative electricity lying embosomed in an omni- 
present ether" 2 is at best but an aid to the imagin- 
ation. To think otherwise is to sink back into the 
old Kantian error of rejecting the knowledge of 
causation as an illusion and substituting for it idle 
dreams sprung from the fallacy of resemblance. 
Once again I urge, then, that truth consists in know- 
ing not what things look like, but what they are 
doing. 

(2) But there is a second and still more ruinous 
oversight in this Hegelian theory of the systematic 
whole and its parts. It consists in forgetting that 
since our knowledge of the Whole must necessarily 
be very finite and defective, therefore it can be used 
only negatively and not positively. Let me explain. 

I may know, for example, very little about the 
inner constitution of the human body and yet be 
fully aware that a very small bit of poison will 

1 Duncan, The New Knowledge, 256 and 172. * Ibid, 252. 



84 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

destroy it. Or again, to destroy a bridge it is not 
necessary to take it all apart ; a few stones removed 
here and there, and it all tumbles into ruin. Or, a 
slight crack in the walls is often enough to show 
that the whole building* is about to collapse. And 
in the way thus illustrated I have dealt with the 
conception of that infinite whole which no sane mind 
pretends to comprehend in all its fullness. By mul- 
tiplied proofs drawn from all the varied forms of 
thinking I have shown that the negation of an in- 
finite self-sacrificing Cause involves the negation of 
all true causality and that that means the complete 
collapse and extinction of thought. This then is 
what I mean by the negative treatment of thought — 
the simple showing of what is necessarily involved 
in the negation of some fundamental principle. 

It seems strange enough that the Hegelians, so 
vociferous in their praises of "negativity," should 
not have seen what might be accomplished through 
this modest method of real negative reasoning. In- 
stead of that they imagined that from their meta- 
phor of the organic whole they could positively de- 
duce and reconstruct the universe. So wild an 
ambition must end, just as Joachim says it does 
end, in shipwreck and irretrievable disaster. 

Summary. But this negative method just de- 
scribed must not be considered as a single thin 
thread of argument upon which very weighty con- 
sequences are supported. On the contrary the argu- 
ment is wide and strong. For human thought may 
be contemplated from many points of view: it is, 



PRAGMATISM AND POLITICS 85 

as it were, a vast building with many sides and 
angles. And whatever side we approach we find 
it so dominated by the principle of causality that 
the negation of that principle involves instant col- 
lapse and ruin. Thus we first considered thought 
as the instituting of relations between things; and 
we found that these relations were incoherent, often 
self -contradictory, until they were so developed as 
to 1 assume the form of causal relations. Then we con- 
sidered thought as predication or judgment; and we 
found that this union of the one substance or subject 
and its many attributes had never been rationally 
explained by logicians and was indeed inexplicable, 
until we had proved it to be a causal unity. Then 
we considered thinking as an abstracting process; 
and then we found that each of those abstractions 
which Bradley and his confreres had reviled as 
"wandering adjectives," as "mutilated, dissected" 
and subjected to all manner of indignities, was in 
reality a splendid vision of the breadth, the depth 
and the height of that causal connection which 
binds the universe together. Then we turned to the 
universal, a thought so baffling that now-a-days its 
very existence is generally denied; but it revealed 
itself to us not only as a true thought but as more 
exalted than all others, since it alone speaks of 
causal processes as absolutely invariable. Surely 
St. Thomas was right when, seven centuries ago, 
he declared universals to be God's thoughts and his 
very essence. 

Is not this a wonderfully cumulative argument? 



86 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

From whatever side or angle we approach the struc- 
ture of truth we find that the cancelling of causality 
tumbles everything into unintelligible ruins. Who 
then will venture to dispute my claim that all truth 
is essentially the affirming of causal connection? 

II. Decay of Truthfulness 

But my doctrine has behind it the authority of no 
school or party. The great body of philosophic 
teachers and thinkers are driven to confess that for 
them the nature of truth transcends all power of 
definition and understanding. Even the idealists, 
generally so self-confident, begin to see that their 
coherence theory has suffered shipwreck. In other 
words, the final outcome of the philosophic move- 
ment since the days of Kant is the now triumphant 
pragmatism. All other theories have failed. The 
followers of Hegel and Spencer, bitterly antagon- 
istic in most other respects, agree in teaching the es- 
sential self-contradictoriness of truth; or, as Mr. 
Mallock puts it, every fact, when thoroughly probed, 
proves to be but "an example of that insoluble con- 
tradiction which underlies our conception of every- 
thing." In an age thus saturated with agnostic and 
pragmatic views there is evidently not very much 
to encourage the love of truth. And unhappily with 
us there have been two special tendencies that have 
mightily discouraged it. 

One of these tendencies is shown at its worst in 
the later history of India. There the universal 



'!*■ PRAGMATISM AND POLITICS 87 

I 

belief in Maya or illusion has spread a veil of deceit 
over everything; and there truthfulness is an almost 
forgotten virtue. 'To this day" says Lord Elphin- 
stone, "unveracity remains the universal and in- 
curable plague-spot in the moral life of India." * 
In Hindu households veracity is said to be scarcely 
recognized as a virtue, and in the Anglo-Indian 
courts of justice native testimony is generally re- 
garded as almost worthless. 2 And so Lord Curzon, 
not long ago Viceroy of India, declared that "the 
dominant note of Asian individuality is in character 
a general indifference to truth and respect for suc- 
cessful wile." 3 

At Rome quite another cause — mercenariness — 
extirpated the old Roman love of truth. Even the 
Stoics scouted at logic "as a false guide leading 
only to pernicious subtleties." 4 "The noblest 
minds were without any desire of knowledge for its 
own sake or any hope of attaining it." 5 "Religion," 
says Froude, "once the foundation of the laws and 
rule of personal conduct, had subsided into opinion. 
The educated in their hearts disbelieved it. Temples 
were still built with increasing splendor, the estab- 
lished forms were scrupulously observed. Public 
men spoke conventionally of Providence that they 
might throw upon their opponents the odium of im- 
piety; but of genuine belief that life had any seri- 

1 Hist. India, I. 378; also Macleod and other authorities. 

2 Maine Village Communities, 225. 
s Curzon, The Far East, 4. 
iRitter, Hist. An. Phil IV. 179. 

5 Dill, Roman Society, 396. 



88 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

ous meaning there was none remaining beyond the 
circle of the silent, patient ignorant multitude." 

Now by a strange fatality which is explained 
in my larger work, our modernism has combined 
both of these impulses so hostile to the truth-loving 
spirit. The philosophic or Indian one is embodied 
in the reign of the Kantian illusionism ; the prac- 
tical Roman one in a universal cupidity inflamed 
almost to madness. Is it any wonder that under 
the sway of two such tremendous forces the love of 
truth for its own sake has vanished ? That the very 
air is fetid with fraud and chicanery? Considering 
the present ethical conditions, one has no right to 
censure the pragmatists; they ought rather to be 
praised for not having denied that truth was at 
least useful. 

The Conflict of Science and Religion. A good 
deal of nonsense has been uttered concerning an 
alleged warfare between religion and science; they 
are even supposed to contradict each other. But 
the differences between them are not fundamental, 
and when the spirit* of dogmatism is exorcised, they 
can be readily adjusted. The only real conflict is 
between that scientific habit of thought — distrust of 
the unverified — and certain illogical tendencies 
which religious teachers now seem more bent upon 
fostering than ever before. The latter are now 
fatuously resting religion upon a faith so blind, so 
unsupported that it would have been rejected scorn- 
fully even in the Middle Ages, 1 Theologians are 

: Armstrong, Transitional Eras, 283. 



PRAGMATISM AND POLITICS 89 

even hailing pragmatism with delight as the true 
bulwark of religion. 1 But if it has no better sup- 
port than that, religion is doomed to die. 

But religion is eternal. It is the primal instinct 
out of which all other knowledge — physical and 
ethical — has been evolved. Even modern science, 
as I have shown in my Philosophy of History, had 
its birth in that ineradicable conviction of the Mid- 
dle Ages that there was One, infinite, self-sacrificing 
Cause of all. And if no one can find a fatal flaw in 
my argument then that conviction becomes the most 
certain, the most completely verified principle within 
the scope of human thought. And the "warfare" 
between science and religion is ended. 

III. Politics 

I touch upon this theme merely to justify the hint 
given in the heading of this chapter, that there is a 
close kinship between pragmatism and modern 
politics. Our political life is the incarnation of the 
pragmatic principle that truth is truth only when it 
is useful. In other words, it is the masquerade of 
deceit, venality, fraud, bribery and thieving under 
the fair form of democracy. Civil government in 
America has been perverted into an instrument for 
promoting industrial schemes — trusts, monopolies, 
etc. — which increase the burdens, steal the bread 
and embitter the life of the common people. 

Even those most friendly to the existing order of 

1 Lyman, Studies in Phil. 



90 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

things, if they have any spirit of fairness, are forced 
to concede this perversion of democracy. Thus Dr. 
Shaw says: 1 "If government in America had more 
carefully regulated the conditions of economic life, 
in order to maintain equality of opportunity, it 
would have been scarcely possible for these dis- 
turbances to have arisen which are due partly to 
the over-development of particular corporations, 
and partly to the undue extent of the personal for- 
tunes and corporate control of particular individ- 
uals. * * * I have tried to prove that a more 
statesman-like policy as respects the sources of 
natural wealth in our public domain would have 
inured to the benefit of the national treasury and 
prevented some of those harmful inequalities of for- 
tune due to the acquirement by private interests of 
the iron ore deposits, the petroleum fields, the coal 
belts, the timber areas and certain other factors of 
national enrichment, which only recently were the 
property of all the people, but which, through a 
slack and negligent public policy, have now become 
monopolized in the hands of a few, and are the 
sources of colossal private fortunes. In like man- 
ner it is easy enough now to see that lines of public 
policy — wholly equitable and in accord with our 
general principles of equality and freedom — would 
have prevented the development of the larger trusts 
and combinations, at least in the forms they have 
now assumed, with stupendous individual fortunes 
as the key to their economic methods." 

1 Shaw. Political Problems of American Development, 184-5. 



PRAGMATISM AND POLITICS 91 

Shaw, indeed, would apologize for these trans- 
actions as merely "neglects and mistakes." But 
hosts of ordinary people have been hustled off to 
prison for similar "neglects and mistakes," on a 
far narrower scale. 

The Winning of the West. Under this title our 
President has written a historical romance highly 
esteemed by some. But no history has yet been 
written recounting the way in which, during the last 
forty years, the West has been really won by the 
speculators and gamblers of the East. 

Such a work would tell the story of the railroads 
with their enorrrfous capitalization largely fictitious ; 
of the Lake Superior iron-ore lands, valued at a 
thousand millions of dollars, 1 a little while ago 
belonging to the public domain, now surreptitiously 
passed into private hands; of the lumber, oil and 
iron trusts, the tariff and the whole brood of minor 
iniquities by which the West has been won. Neither 
Alexander the Great nor any other conqueror ever 
made so golden a conquest and by such base 
methods. The annual tribute extorted by the East 
from the West — after deducting a fair return for 
capital really expended — is twenty times greater 
than that which Imperial Rome extorted from the 
whole civilized world. 

But the West is the garden of the world ; if it 
had not been, it would already have become a desert 
through this draining away of its resources. And 
its people are the elite of all nations ; for, of our 

1 Ibid, 113. 



92 IMPENDING ANARCHY 

emigration the weaker element stops on the Atlantic 
coast, the better pushes on and out to the land of 
hope and opportunity. Only there are alien races 
really assimilated by the magic touch of simple rural 
life, communion with Nature in her kindliest moods 
and the freedom, of the boundless prairies. And 
this people, in all the quiet, genial strength of their 
solidarity, have resolved to throw off the yoke. 
Four years ago the political campaign was decided 
partly by a fancy for "Rough Riders," but mainly 
by the disgust and disheartening of the great ma- 
jority of the opposition who saw their chosen leader 
sacrificed to the greed and malignity of the money 
power. And this year they are waiting to see 
whether that betrayal is to be repeated, or whether, 
with the man of their choice as standard-bearer, 
they are to march on to victory. Once already the 
West, with her Lincoln, Grant and their comrades, 
has saved the Republic which — if defended only by 
the egoism and pretenses of the East — would have 
gone to pieces in ninety days. If left free, she may 
save it again; or, at least, ward off impending- 
anarchy for many years. 

Conclusion 

But the purest politics, the wisest economic and 
administrative schemes can give only temporary 
relief. They cannot cure the fatal disease raging 
in all the veins of our modernism. Where there is 
no vision of God and righteousness the people must 



PRAGMATISM AND POLITICS 93 

perish. And the whole drift of modern philosophy 
for the last hundred years has been to reject that 
vision as a mirage. 

( 1 ) But against my conclusion the hackneyed 
argument may be urged that religion and morals 
are in no worse plight than the physical sciences : 
they, too, must begin with postulates or assump- 
tions. I answer that physical science has but one 
real postulate — the absolute invariability of the 
sequences between the motions of thing's — and that 
postulate has been verified untold thousands of times 
with such minute, mathematical exactitude that 
only a madman could doubt its truth. But mani- 
festly religion and moral laws cannot be thus veri- 
fied by means of the Differential Calculus. 

(2) Or it may be urged that a great many peo- 
ple still pay some respect to religion and morals. 
But that is as absurd as to argue that because a 
river maintains its smooth and even course, there- 
fore it cannot be about to plunge into an abyss al- 
though the abyss is in plain sight. 

I ask, then, the philosophic teachers and thinkers 
of America : Why imitate Nero ? Why continue 
to fiddle over the old discords and obscure subtleties 
while Rome is burning? Answer my argument. 
Show, if possible, some fatal flaw in it. Test it, 
as in a ship-wreck you would test a life-line, even 
though the man offering it should be unknown to 
fame and the line should not be fabricated after the 
fantastic methods of German philosophy. 



The Philosophy of History 

By S. S. HEBBERD 



Revistd Edition 



(From The Reformed Church Reviezv.) 

"If this book had the imprint of Berlin or Oxford upon its title-page 
it would command immediate attention. The author himself feels that 
it is heavily handicapped by the very grandeur of its pretensions. . . . 
After reading a few pages one is captivated by the simplicity, the direct- 
ness and the penetration of the author. He makes you think. Whether 
you agree with him or not you cannot deny that you are confronted by a 
man who has read widely, pondered his material carefully and thought 
clearly. The work deserves far more popularity than it appears to have 
received. 

". . . The reader is naturally afraid of a man who has found 
a key, especially one that will explain all the mysteries of civilization. 
Yet it must be conceded that the writer pleads his cause with remarkable 
ingenuity, and with his striking antitheses and epigrammatic sentences 
throws new light upon his subject at many points. If he does nothing 
else he sets one thinking along the broad deep lines which are co- 
extensive with the breadth and depth of the racial movement itself. 
". . . The book abounds in keen distinctions like these. They may 
raise problems rather than solve them, but a production that does even 
fhat is well worth reading." 

(From Rev. N. McGee Waters, Pastor Tompkins Ave. Cong. Church, 
Brooklyn, New York.) 
"I am not certain yet whether I am satisfied that you have found 
the solution of the riddle. Your solution at first strikes one as too 
simple — but so are all the great laws s-imple. Anyhow, for horizon, 
inspiration and outlook and as a compendium of learning it is a book of 
the first rank. I am going to read it again." 

(From the Chicago Tribune.) 
"How so simple a thought as this can be carried out as a law of 
interpretation in the study of the great distinctive, historic civilization 
as that of India, the classical, the medieval, the Reformation, the genesis 
of science, modern art and morality, and the social revolution since the 
reformation is what the author has attempted to show in this remarkably 
lucid, cogent, and suggestive book." 



"It is, in fact, one of the most penetrating and illuminating philo^ 
sophical-Hstctical essays that have appeared for a long while. And its 
style indicates, to an uncommon degree, not only strong mastery of the 
theme, but a singularly fine self-mastery, which holds the author so 
perfectly to his single aim. One who reads intelligently this book, 
whether or not lie accept fully the theory, will get a clew to modern 
thought and modern history he did not have, at least so clearly, before." 

" 'The Philosophy of History' is a timely work and one that will be 
sought after by all students and lovers of history. In this work the 
author has gi\en to the world a book that should bring him fame as a 
reward for a lifetime of labor spent in its preparation." — Southern Star, 
Atlanta, Ga. 

"A book into, which a strong thinker has put a large part of the 
forces of his life is not to be set aside lightly. And this book will repay 
careful study. . . . These are the merest hints of the scheme of 
thought which the writer of this book has developed with much wealth of 
historical illustration and fine philosophical insight." — The Christian 
Century. 

"There is very much that is weighty as well as ingenious in your 
speculations upon the Philosophy of Art. I have seen no better theory 
of the beautiful than yours." — C. E. Norton, LL.D., L.H.D., Prof, of Art 
in Harvard University. 

"This book is a noble contribution to the philosophy of history. We 
feel convinced that it will find its way to readers of every clas3." — 
Neiv York World. 

(Part of a lengthy review of a preliminary sketch of this book. Present 
management not responsible therefor.) 
"This took is abundant evidence of the high philosophical ability 
of the author. Its characterization of artistic, industrial and moral 
tendencies is capital." — Wm. D. Hyde, DD., LL.D., Pres't Bowdoin 
College. 

"The style is as clear as a crystal, while the ideas are singularly 
marked by modesty, manliness and affluent suggestiveness." — Chris- 
tian Era. 

"Your book seems to me an epoch-making hook. It is the clearest, 
most profound and most rational exposition of the science of thinking 
that I have ever seen. I have studied Lotze, . . . and many others, 
but I have really got a better outlook into thought and life, a firmer 
foundation for faith and reason in your little book than from them all." — > 
Rev. John Faville, D.D., Peoria, 111. 

"A book of very great value. . . . The latter part, where you 
treat of the distinction between idealism and realism and apply it to the 
various fields of nun an life, and especially to human history, seems to 
me of fascinating interest. I do not know when I have read more 
suggestive pages in the line of the philosophy of history than in your 
book."— 1 res't G. A. Gates, D.D., LL.D., Iowa College. 



JUN 16 1908 



"Your principle is a pregnant one. In the teaching of Psychology, 
I have made large use of it, especially under the subject of perception 
and consciousness."— Ex-Pres't E. II. Merrell, D.D., Ripon College. 

"It is an able and thoughtful discussion." — Prof. Geo. P. Fisher, 
Yale University. 

"I have read it with the deepest interest, and with regret that I have 
never come to know before one of so much ability and depth of research." 
— Prof. G. B. Willcox, D.D., Chicago Theological Seminary. 

"You have pursued without deviation a line of reasoning that is very 
suggestive and worthy of earnest attention." — Pres't R. C. Flagc, D.D., 
Ripon College. 

"It comes to me in philosophy as the Golden Rule does in ethics. 
The foundation principle is simple; the application tremendous in its 
sweep. I know it is the finest, freshest and most original putting that I 
have found in my reading." — Rev. Henry Faville, D.D., La Crosse, Wis. 

"Your chapter upon Art is delightful." — Prof. C. M. Tyler, Cornell 
University. 

" Your book has left upon me a strong impression and given to me a 
great encouragement. It is the only prophecy I have seen, from the 
purely philosophic standpoint, of the new earth now emerging. . . . 
Your book has strengthened me for my own work." — Geo. D. 
Herron, D.P. 

"We do not remember to have ever read a more able and comprehen- 
sive account of the progress of civilization within so small a compass 
nor one so suggestive of thought." — Cincinnati Commercial-Gazette. 

"A tremendous task is attempted here. . . . The book must be 
read to gain the author's conception and is sure to repay the reading."— 
Auburn Seminary Review. 

" 'The Philosophy of History' is a carefully wrought essay in which 
the attempt is made to establish a single law of thought which will 
successfully explain the course of hitman development. . . . Taking 
this fundamental law as a key, the author applies it in turn to the doors 
of human history and makes it open them all in succession from the 
contemplative systems of Indian thought to the industrial conflicts of the 
nineteenth century. The book cannot be even summarised here, but it 
may be said that its treatment of old problems is fresh, logical and in 
many respects convincing. Especially is this true of the chapters on 
classical and mediaeval art in which the fundamental law is armirably 
illustrated." — The Dial. 



i2mo, 307 Pages, Cloth Bound 
Price, Postpaid, $1.50 



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